Open access, closed systems: independent online journalism in Japan

Abstract

This article is part of an ethnography of Japan’s ‘independent’ journalism movement, with a focus on the establishment and dissolution of the Free Press Association of Japan (FPAJ). Based on 13 months of fieldwork within this organization and other internet news broadcasters (i.e., the Independent Web Journal, Our Planet TV), I argue that the conventional taxonomies applied to journalists and journalistic praxis do not easily apply to Japan. Even in the period of heightened political activism following the March 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster, the country’s stalwart kisha (press) club infrastructure proved too great an obstacle for comparatively informal challengers such as the FPAJ. While resistance movements and protest groups have made much use of the internet here, as in other parts of the world, the FPAJ’s attempt to provide direct streaming access to official sources of information largely failed to attract official sources to its press conferences and to generate consistently newsworthy material. The FPAJ attempted to argue that anyone in Japan could be a journalist, but its eventual bankruptcy and dissolution ultimately wound up serving the argument for a professional and official journalistic class put forward by the colleagues whose monopoly over the information they were fighting against.

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