Liberal Japan

Here’s a story worth following:

The scheduled launch of a joint Web site by the nation’s three leading newspapers is expected to bolster the quality of their articles as readers will be able to scrutinize different accounts of the same stories from three papers. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, The Asahi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shimbun agreed Monday to cooperate over the Web site and rural delivery services, as well as help each other with newspaper production in the event of a disaster.

Supposedly they have developed a system where these three newspapers can cooperate on the technical side of delivery without compromising the content of their newspapers.

All three newspapers are mainstream. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the Yomiuri are fairly conservative, while the Asahi generally leans to the left. There are a lot of questions lingering in my mind after reading the full article about this upcoming service:

1. Will the newspapers continue to maintain their own individual Internet sites as well as participate in the main site?
2. As far as the shared site, who will edit the main entry page and determine which articles get the most notice?

I don’t understand the new system yet, and it certainly could be good, but various alarm bells are sounding in my head about the left and right supposedly blending their papers together … if I learn more about this I’ll forward it here. If Rupert Murdoch is involved in all this, it’ll certainly spoil it for me.