Two recent seminars on the future of print journalism in Japan to report. One last week held by Japan’s most well-known English newspaper the Japan Times (with the University of Tokyo Inter-faculty Initiative in Information Studies) was publicized as a seminar about the future of English-language journalism in East Asia, but ended up veering pretty far from that theme. The other was held by the country’s third-largest Japanese-language daily Mainichi shimbun and focused on information in a network society and the future of journalism. If the seminars were any indication of where these newspapers are heading, then I can say with all honesty that while Mainichi has its act together, the Japan Times is in for a pretty rough road ahead.

The Mainichi symposium featured (among others) two great speakers on journalism who I admire a lot, IT journalist Sasaki Toshinao, formerly a journalist with Mainichi, and blogger and journalist Fujishiro Hiroyuki. For more about these two see for reference this translated interview with Sasaki-san at Global Voices, and pick up a copy of “Blog Journalism: Media for 3 million people” co-authored by Fujishiro-san for more on his views. Both have a lot of interesting things to say, some of which I’d like to write about in the future.

The only point I want to make now though is that these guys said something substantial. They really made me — and, I think it’s safe to say, the rest of the audience — think. They were able to do this because instead of ignoring the changes happening in media, they took them head on and tried to frame them in a way that makes sense.

They had a fascinating topic to work with. Japan’s upcoming media transformation is one of the most underreported topics in English-language news on Japan; it wiill completely change the way that the next generation of Japanese get their information. Here you’ve got a country with six of the world’s largest ten newspapers in terms of circulation, most of them giant conglomerates selling a lot more than just print media, and yet young people hardly read newspapers at all. Something’s going to change, and it will be pretty dramatic.

Mainichi gets this, which is why they invited such great speakers to their event.

The Japan Times event was a flop in comparison. None of the keynote speakers even stuck to the theme of English-language journalism in East Asia, let alone touching on deeper issues. The speaker for Reporters without Borders talked almost exclusively about his own organization. The professor from Korea talked about changes in media without mentioning Korean citizen media and projects like OhmyNews. I don’t recall the word “blog” coming up even once in any of the presentations.

The “old”/”new” media thing is overdone, I know. But when a Japanese paper manages to pull off an event the way Mainichi did, there is really no reason why the Japan Times, the “world’s window on Japan”, can’t do the same. They may have a few years left, but if they keep using them this way they sure won’t have many more.