I’m reading “Blog Journalism: Media for 3 million people” right now and stumbled on an interesting passage that I thought I would translate. The passage features the book’s three co-authors Yukawa Tsuruaki, Takada Masayuki and Fujishiro Hiroyuki discussing participatory journalism (Chapter 8, p. 129-130). The topic of discussion is Kanaloco, a site initiated in 2005 by Kanagawa Shimbun, which took the bold step (at least in 2005) of opening the door to comments and trackbacks. (Keep in mind that Japanese newspapers have generally been very conservative until recently (and even now) in allowing users to do this kind of thing.)

Yukawa describes the reaction of users when the site was opened to comments:

再スタート後にウェブサイトにアクセスが殺到しシステムがダウンしました。神奈川新聞の予想をはるかに上回るアクセスが寄せられたのです。サイトの編集部もブログをやっているのですが、そこに寄せられたコメントを読んでみてください。激励や賞賛のコメントであふれています。わたしは今まで、これほど多くの激励の言葉が新聞に向けられたものを読んだことがありません。業界関係者として胸が熱くなるものがありました。編集部の女性マナジャーは、コメントを読んで涙したそうです。読者は新聞との対話を持ち望んでいたのだなと実感しました。

After restarting [the online site], there was a flood of [people] accessing the website and the system went down. There were far more people accessing the site than Kanagawa Shimbun had ever expected. The site editors were also [writing] blogs, please have a look and read the comments on those blogs. They are flooded with comments of encouragement and admiration. To this very day, I have never before read so many words of encouragement and admiration directed at a newspaper. As someone involved in the industry, this warmed my heart. The woman manager of the editing department apparently read the comments and started to cry. I felt keenly at that time the degree to which readers had had a desire to interact with newspapers.

With all the feelings of gloom surrounding the newspaper industry (and mainstream media in general), this kind of perspective is really needed.

Eyes on Tibet link:
US Covertly Funds Global Tibet Movement: German Daily (Friends of Tibet)