A
survey by Dentsu Public Relations carried out last month showed that nearly twenty percent of Japanese people are heavy news aggregator users. These kinds of websites, known as
matome saito in Japanese, collect news and information from various news sites in one convenient location. However, despite their popularity, their legitimacy has been questioned repeatedly due to the problems of recycling copyrighted content. As their popularity in Japan continues to increase, we will probably start to see an increased focus on regulating and removing news aggregators that are particularly egregious in their use of copyrighted content without permission.
The Study
The survey included 1200 Japanese residents. More than a third of the people interviewed use the most popular news aggregators. While about 75% of them used news aggregator websites about once a week, nearly 18.5% of the people interviewed use these websites daily in order to keep updated on the latest news. One of the most surprising parts of this survey relates to how the use of news aggregators relates to television news coverage. Only about thirty percent of the people interviewed saw the news on television after seeing it online. This shows that in Japan, this medium has become an established news source, with nearly a third of the population receiving their news on these kinds of websites and on social media platforms. Most importantly, news aggregators often serve as a quick, information-packed diversion for younger Japanese residents, where the use of news aggregators was considerably higher than the average. By customizing the kinds of news they want to receive, they can find information they are interested in at a glance.
Are News Aggregator Sites Ethical?
News aggregator sites have been the subject of much debate in Japan. One of the most popular news boards in Japan, 2Channel,
recently started to block websites and blogs that would collect their content. This is not only an ongoing problem in Japan, but also in the West. For example, the Associated Press (AP) has
sued a news aggregator service recently because of problems with the way they use AP content without a license and charging their clients a fee. When it comes to these kinds of websites, the line between social media distribution of news headlines, news clipping, and actually stealing content is quite blurry and not established clearly. Search engines can be customized to act as news aggregators and actually create copies of copyrighted content, but this kind of use is actually accepted by the courts.
Advantages and Disadvantages of News Aggregator Use Over Traditional Media
There is no question that news aggregators offer numerous advantages. Particularly for the younger crowd, news aggregators are a handy source of entertainment and those that integrate social media also allow sharing and commenting news with friends online. With the kind of smartphone use that occurs in Japan, it is also quite natural for these kinds of websites to gain prominence since they are often more convenient to consult on a mobile device than traditional online news websites. However, news aggregators have their disadvantages as well, as was seen in the
March 11 tsunami incident last year.
Although social media and smartphones are extremely important in today's Japanese society, traditional media outlets still play a very important role in Japanese society. In fact, the vast majority of people interviewed in Japan considered that their television was their main source of information in the days following this natural disaster. In fact, more people used radio as their most important source of information than smartphones, probably due to numerous Internet outages and an overload of the mobile network. This anomaly is almost certainly due to a generational shift. Analyzing the numbers, it is clear that the younger generation's use of mobile devices, news aggregators, and social media is staggeringly disproportionately higher than older Japanese residents.
What This Tells Us About the Japanese Market
This disproportionate use of mobile devices as news sources indicates that there is a very important potential market growing in Japan. Trends clearly show that use of news aggregators will definitely increase in the future as the younger generation starts to become the majority of Japan's population. With news organizations like the AP starting to get into the news aggregator sector themselves, we will probably start to see traditional online news reporting being gradually replaced by a model derived from today's news aggregators.
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About the Guest Author:
Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.
