The last in the Yomiuri Shinbun‘s recent series of articles on blogging appeared in yesterday’s evening edition. (The first two articles are here and here.) The above-pictured headline reads in Japanese Sankagata media no toujou, and translates roughly into “A new kind of interactive media has appeared.” The article looks at “personal journalism” via blogging in America, and bases the article on the recent Google acquires Pyra (Blogger) news which journalist Dan Gillmor broke on his eJournal blog, here.
Not surprisingly, Gillmor is quoted, as is Rebecca Blood, Online Journalism Review‘s J.D. Lasica, and Japan’s own blogger-cum-renaissance man Joichi Ito.
UPDATE (March 6): Please see the comments for translations of Rebecca’s and Joi’s comments. (Thanks Trevor!)
Thanks for this update. I took the interview, but didn’t say anything really smart. What did they quote me say, if anything? I’m in Silicon Valley and don’t have a Yomiuri. I’m worried that if I said something stupid, the 2ch Trolls make come to get me again…
joi-
i have no idea what you said, not being kanji-enabled myself. pathetic I know, but I had my wife scan the article and give me the gist, and she said “some Japanese guy named Joichi Ito is quoted at the end of the article”. 🙂
It says (and this is off the cuff)…
On the other hand, Joichi Ito, CEO of Neoteny, who has been involved with the net in Japan since the beginning, and who runs a blog himself says “The silent majority who think but can’t express their thoughts are even greater in number in Japan than in America. We’re told that ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down’, but when Japan changes, it changes in a big way. I’d like to anticipate that as blogging tools spread, it will create an environment wherein anyone can easily speak their mind.
Or something like that… 😉
Nice translation. The interaction in your comments section is pretty amazing too! I guess this is what blogging is all about.
Thanks Trevor for that!
btw, I emailed Rebecca Blood tipping her off about the article, and she asked me for a translation of what she said. So my ever-patient wife and I cobbled this translation of her quotes together:
“Blogs are not a new kind of Journalism.”
“Commercial media will report the news from the viewpoint of a company unconsciously
(unvoluntarily??), while blogs can look at a problem from various viewpoints. This kind of multiple inquiry is the distinctive feature of blogs.”
Trevor, if you or anyone else wants to give translating her comments a better shot than this, please do!
Here’s how I read it… not much different than yours. 🙂
Rebecca Blood, author of the “Weblog Handbook” and more, says “Blogs are not a new form of journalism, but rather a participatory medium. The business media unconsciously end up writing articles from the viewpoint of corporations, but blogs can look at a problem from many multiple viewpoints. It is this integrational inquiry that makes blogs unique.”
Man, that last sentence is a doozie! It’s amazingly concise and cool in Japanese though. 🙂
trevor, thanks again! yup, my wife and I struggled over that last one too. I do have to say that “integrational inquiry” makes me laugh, it reminds me of the various collocations dot.com companies would come up with back in the day (eg. dack’s bullshit generator)
I got a response from Rebecca on my wife and I’s translation (I’m going to send her your’s Trevor, in a sec). She writes that it was one of the hardest interviews she’s done: “I tried to strip my answers of any idiomatic phrases, since the reporter (who had rudimentary english) would have to read and then translate it for his or her article.” She thinks the quote(s) were taken from this statement:
“Commercial media routinely present these stories from the perspective of the corporations that are involved. Weblogs often consider these very complex issues from many perspectives, but these complex considerations never make it into the pages of the newspaper.”