Here is a real story about Japan. The foreign press is very interested in stories coming from Japan as they see it as cutting edge, or predicting the future of their own societies:For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk
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By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: January 1, 2010
TOKYO — For Atsushi Nakanishi, jobless since Christmas, home is a cubicle barely bigger than a coffin — one of dozens of berths stacked two units high in one of central Tokyo’s decrepit “capsule” hotels.

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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Atsushi Nakanishi has condensed his possessions to two suitcases, which he stores in lockers at the capsule hotel where he lives. More Photos »
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Jobless, and Living in a Bunk
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Times Topics: Japan
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Ko Sasaki for The New York Times
Atsushi Nakanishi is among the jobless living in a capsule hotel, renting a bunk with no door. More Photos >
“It’s just a place to crawl into and sleep,” he said, rolling his neck and stroking his black suit — one of just two he owns after discarding the rest of his wardrobe for lack of space. “You get used to it.”

When Capsule Hotel Shinjuku 510 opened nearly two decades ago, Japan was just beginning to pull back from its bubble economy, and the hotel’s tiny plastic cubicles offered a night’s refuge to salarymen who had missed the last train home.

Now, Hotel Shinjuku 510’s capsules, no larger than 6 1/2 feet long by 5 feet wide, and not tall enough to stand up in, have become an affordable option for some people with nowhere else to go as Japan endures its worst recession since World War II.

Once-booming exporters laid off workers en masse in 2009 as the global economic crisis pushed down demand. Many of the newly unemployed, forced from their company-sponsored housing or unable to make rent, have become homeless.

The country’s woes have led the government to open emergency shelters over the New Year holiday in a nationwide drive to help the homeless. The Democratic Party, which swept to power in September, wants to avoid the fate of the previous pro-business government, which was caught off-guard when unemployed workers pitched tents near public offices last year to call attention to their plight.

“In this bitter-cold New Year’s season, the government intends to do all it can to help those who face hardship,” Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a video posted Dec. 26 on YouTube. “You are not alone.”

On Friday, he visited a Tokyo shelter housing 700 homeless people, telling reporters that “help can’t wait.”

Mr. Nakanishi considers himself relatively lucky. After working odd jobs on an Isuzu assembly line, at pachinko parlors and as a security guard, Mr. Nakanishi, 40, moved into the capsule hotel in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district in April to save on rent while he worked night shifts at a delivery company.

Mr. Nakanishi, who studied economics at a regional university, dreams of becoming a lawyer and pores over legal manuals during the day. But with no job since Christmas, he does not know how much longer he can afford a capsule bed.

The rent is surprisingly high for such a small space: 59,000 yen a month, or about $640, for an upper bunk. But with no upfront deposit or extra utility charges, and basic amenities like fresh linens and free use of a communal bath and sauna, the cost is far less than renting an apartment in Tokyo, Mr. Nakanishi says.

Still, it is a bleak world where deep sleep is rare. The capsules do not have doors, only screens that pull down. Every bump of the shoulder on the plastic walls, every muffled cough, echoes loudly through the rows.

Each capsule is furnished only with a light, a small TV with earphones, coat hooks, a thin blanket and a hard pillow of rice husks.

Most possessions, from shirts to shaving cream, must be kept in lockers. There is a common room with old couches, a dining area and rows of sinks. Cigarette smoke is everywhere, as are security cameras. But the hotel staff does its best to put guests at ease: “Welcome home,” employees say at the entrance.

“Our main clients used to be salarymen who were out drinking and missed the last train,” said Tetsuya Akasako, head manager at the hotel.

But about two years ago, the hotel started to notice that guests were staying weeks, then months, he said. This year, it introduced a reduced rent for dwellers of a month or longer; now, about 100 of the hotel’s 300 capsules are rented out by the month.

After requests from its long-term dwellers, the hotel received special government permission to let them register their capsules as their official abode; that made it easier to land job interviews.

At 2 a.m. on one recent December night, two young women watched the American television show “24” on a TV inside the sauna. One said she had traveled to Tokyo from her native Gunma, north of the city, to look for work. She intended to be a hostess at one of the capital’s cabaret clubs, where women engage in conversation with men for a fee.

The woman, 20, said she was hoping to land a job with a club that would put her up in an apartment. She declined to give her name because she did not want her family to know her whereabouts.

“It’s tough to live like this, but it won’t be for too long,” she said. “At least there are more jobs here than in Gunma.”

The government says about 15,800 people live on the streets in Japan, but aid groups put the figure much higher, with at least 10,000 in Tokyo alone. Those numbers do not count the city’s “hidden” homeless, like those who live in capsule hotels. There is also a floating population that sleeps overnight in the country’s many 24-hour Internet cafes and saunas.

The jobless rate, at 5.2 percent, is at a record high, and the number of households on welfare has risen sharply. The country’s 15.7 percent poverty rate is one of the highest among industrialized nations.

These statistics have helped shatter an image, held since the country’s rise as an industrial power in the 1970s, that Japan is a classless society.

“When the country enjoyed rapid economic growth, standards of living improved across the board and class differences were obscured,” said Prof. Hiroshi Ishida of the University of Tokyo. “With a stagnating economy, class is more visible again.”

The government has poured money into bolstering Japan’s social welfare system, promising cash payments to households with children and abolishing tuition fees at public high schools.

Still, Naoto Iwaya, 46, is on the verge of joining the hopeless. A former tuna fisherman, he has been living at another capsule hotel in Tokyo since August. He most recently worked on a landfill at the city’s Haneda Airport, but that job ended last month.

“I have looked and looked, but there are no jobs. Now my savings are almost gone,” Mr. Iwaya said, after checking into an emergency shelter in Tokyo. He will be allowed to stay until Monday.

After that, he said, “I don’t know where I can go.”
So, the rest of the world views this as Science Fiction, however it has been a reality here in Japan for a number of decades. What is the future going to show us? Write that story and I promise you it will be published and paid for in the New York Times. Send it to me first for editing.

Which of these three news items is the most important, and what has been missed here? What are the really important news items of this year 2010? I mean not just for you here in Japan but for everyone in the world?
- QUOTATION OF THE DAY -

"People are starting to see it like drunk driving, and that's the comparison we need to continue to make."
- STEVE FARLEY, an Arizona state representative from Tucson who in 2007
first proposed banning texting while driving.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/technology/02distracted.html?th&emc=th

..................

- WORLD --
Photographs: Between War and Peace
A fragile calm has settled in Darfur, Sudan's western region that has become synonymous with conflict.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/01/world/20100101DARFUR_index.html?th&emc=th

- OPINION -
The Thread: The Homeland Secretary's Job Security
Is 'the system worked' this White House's 'heckuva job, Brownie'?
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/the-homeland-secretarys-job-security/?th&emc=th

Here's an interesting take from Wired via Futurismic:
Homeopapes: journalism by machine
Paul Raven @ 29-12-2009
Here’s an interesting piece at Wired UK that picks up the “OMG journalism is dying” ball and runs with it in the direction of automated machine-to-machine and machine-to-person news aggregation:

NewsScope is a machine-readable news service designed for financial institutions that make their money from automated, event-driven, trading. Triggered by signals detected by algorithms within vast mountains of real-time data, trading of this kind now accounts for a significant proportion of turnover in the world’s financial centres.

Reuters’ algorithms parse news stories. Then they assign “sentiment scores” to words and phrases. The company argues that its systems are able to do this “faster and more consistently than human operators”.

Millisecond by millisecond, the aim is to calculate “prevailing sentiment” surrounding specific companies, sectors, indices and markets. Untouched by human hand, these measurements of sentiment feed into the pools of raw data that trigger trading strategies.

[...]

Here and there, interesting possibilities are emerging. Earlier this year, at Northwestern University in the US, a group of computer science and journalism students rigged up a programme called Stats Monkey that uses statistical data to generate news reports on baseball matches.

Stats Monkey relies upon two key metrics: Game Score (which allows a computer to figure out which team members are influencing the action most significantly) and Win Probability (which analyses the state of a game at any particular moment, and calculates which side is likely to win).

Combining the two, Stats Monkey identifies the players who change the course of games, alongside specific turning points in the action. The rest of the process involves on-the-fly assembly of templated “narrative arcs” to describe the action in a format recognisable as a news story.

The resulting news stories read surprisingly well. If we assume that the underlying data is accurate, there’s little to prevent newspapers from using similar techniques to report a wide range of sporting events.

So what is your opinion of this:
NBC criticized for 'chequebook journalism'
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 29, 2009 | 4:27 PM ET Comments22Recommend27
The Associated Press
David Goldman, top, followed by his Sean, waves as he boards a plane at the Galeao airport, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Dec. 24. (Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press)
A professional journalists' group is condemning NBC News for chartering a plane that carried a New Jersey man involved in a custody battle home from Brazil with his son.

The New York-based Society of Professional Journalists is calling it "chequebook journalism" and said the arrangement damages the network's credibility.

David Goldman, who successfully fought the Brazilian family of his now-deceased ex-wife for custody of nine-year-old Sean, granted an interview to Meredith Vieira of NBC's Today show that aired Monday.

NBC said Goldman was booked for Today before the network invited him on the plane.

The network had already arranged for the plane to bring its own employees back to the U.S. for Christmas, NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said. If NBC hadn't brought the Goldmans home, one of its rivals would have, she said.

"We've covered this story exceptionally well," she said. "Their going on the plane did not affect our coverage of the story or getting them booked at all."

Viewers told of payment

NBC News told viewers it had paid for the Goldmans' trip home, she said. The network showed pictures of the Goldmans on the plane and Nightly News featured a brief interview by correspondent Jeff Rossen with David Goldman while both were on the plane.

The journalists' group said NBC was paying for access, even if it was only covering the cost of a trip by plane.

"Paying for access taints the credibility and neutrality of what you are doing," said Andy Schotz, chairman of the SPJ ethics committee. "There is now a motive for people to be helping you, to be telling you what you want to hear."

Most news organizations say they don't pay for interviews. But critics say the commonly used practice of paying to license photos or video from a subject matter or paying for someone's travel is a way of getting around the restriction.

CNN and ABC paid for cellphone pictures taken by Jasper Schuringa, the man who helped subdue an alleged terrorist who tried to take down a Detroit-bound plane. Both also interviewed Schuringa but denied any connection between the payments and the interviews.

© The Canadian Press, 2009

Here is the longest and perhaps the pathetically best summary so far of the news paper dilemma (read my bottom notes):

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TIM ARANGO
Published: December 27, 2009
Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free.

Jason Reed/Reuters
Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation charges for access to The Wall Street Journal and could do the same on Hulu.
Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.

Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge.

Rupert Murdoch, beyond charging for access to The Journal, has talked about forming a partnership with a single search engine, which would pay him for the rights to scour the news and entertainment programming produced by his company, the News Corporation, rather than letting all search engines crawl his sites. Also Hulu, which is owned partly by Mr. Murdoch’s company, is considering charging viewers to watch some of the TV shows it now streams free.

Magazine publishers, meanwhile, have banded together to try to create their own version of the iTunes store, aiming for a day when they can sell enhanced versions of what they have been giving away. And more and more media companies are planning to charge for apps on iPhones and other mobile devices, as well as on the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Media companies of all stripes built their business models on the assumption that advertising would continue to pour into their coffers. But with advertising in a tailspin, they now must shrink, shut down or find some way to shift more of the cost burden to consumers — the same consumers who have so blissfully become accustomed to Web content that costs nothing.

So will future consumers look back on 2010 as the year they finally had to reach into their own pockets?

Industry experts have their doubts, saying that pay systems might work, but in limited ways and only for some sites. Publishers who sounded early this year as though they were raring to go have not yet taken the leap, and the executives who advocate change tend to range from vague to cautious in making any predictions about fundamentally changing the finances of their battered businesses.

But one thing clearly has shifted already, in a year rife with magazine closures and newspaper bankruptcies: conventional wisdom among media companies has swung hard from the belief that pay walls would only curb traffic and stifle ad revenue, to the view that media businesses need to try something new, because the current path appears to lead to extinction.

“Content providers see that the idea that everything has to be free, supported by ads, isn’t working well, and they’re trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube, but only partially,” said Alan D. Mutter, a media consultant and blogger who has been an executive at digital media companies.

He went on: “So we’re looking at some sort of an inflection point, at least in attitude. But I haven’t seen much realistic, hard-headed thinking about how that’s going to happen, so I don’t know how much is really going to change.”

Ann S. Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, said, “A lot is going to change over the next two years.” But she conceded that it was very hard to predict the shape of that change, and she said that adding pay walls alone probably would not work.

Of course, it is the established media, with their legacy of high operating costs and outdated technology, that face this problem. Leaner, newer online competitors will continue to be free, avidly picking up the users lost by sites that begin to charge.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor in chief of The Huffington Post, predicted that much of the talk of media’s mining the Web for new revenue would never become reality — and that if it did, free sites like hers would benefit. Some of the plans now being laid might work, she said, but many of them would just alienate the Internet users who click from one site to another, wherever links and their curiosity take them.

“I’m not minimizing the fact that there’s a need to experiment with multiple new business models,” she said. “I just don’t believe in ignoring the current realities.”

For more than a decade, media companies have hoped for a day when they could either control access to their products online or at least put a price on them that a mass market would bear. But that day has never come. What has changed is the level of threat they face, given the worst advertising downturn in memory.

Since the infancy of the Web, there have been predictions that by making information more plentiful and accessible, prices would be steadily driven down, with no bottom in sight. At first, it did not seem to matter: Internet advertising grew at a breakneck pace, and traditional media thrived even as the assumption of free content took root online.

But eventually, the rise of the Internet punished most media, starting with the music industry, in the form of file-sharing. That history offers an object lesson. Despite the success of iTunes and other pay services, illegal downloads remain common.

Print publications are suffering most now, but digital distribution has grown in importance for broadcast television. Nearly all of its content is now available free online, as broadcast media lose audience and advertising. Book publishers are also fighting the tide; Simon & Schuster said recently that it would delay the release of e-book versions of 35 big titles, like Karl Rove’s memoir and a Don DeLillo novel, fearing that the $9.99 digital versions would eat into sales of hardcover copies.

Cable television has been an exception, thriving on subscriber fees, but even there, executives fret that consumers are disentangling themselves from their cable boxes, free to pick and choose individual programs online and watch on their TVs. Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, has advanced a plan that he calls TV Everywhere, which would allow paying cable television subscribers to view shows online for no extra charge.

Similarly, Comcast started a service this month that gives subscribers to its broadband Internet and digital cable services access to its cable programming on the Web.

These efforts are not about wringing extra dollars from the Web but about preserving the current economics of the business.

“We’re saying, since those payments you have made have found their way to the networks and through distributors that give you the connection, that we want to have you be able to watch all those networks on broadband,” Mr. Bewkes said recently at an investor conference in New York.

A leading evangelist for the coming of a new era is Rupert Murdoch, who has said he envisions a not-too-distant day when all of the News Corporation’s news properties, including Fox News Channel, The Times of London and The New York Post, charge online. He and his executives have repeatedly criticized search engines and news aggregators, saying it was “theft” to profit from publishers’ work.

The News Corporation has been shopping around an online payment software system — so far without much success — in hopes of playing pied piper to other publishers, and it is a charter member of the group of magazine publishers that have banded together, in a consortium announced this month. And there have been talks about the possibility of Microsoft paying for the exclusive rights to have its Bing search engine direct users to News Corporation sites.

“Quality content is not free,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 8, days after delivering a similar message at a Federal Trade Commission workshop. “In the future, good journalism will depend on the ability of a news organization to attract customers by providing news and information they are willing to pay for.”

People who have studied the problem argue that charging online would work only if consumers were offered a much-improved product with the convenience of access anywhere, on any digital device — the core idea behind the magazine consortium and its planned online store.

By that standard, much of the talk of wringing more money from Internet users rings hollow, said Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University and a prominent blogger on media subjects. “People who really think we have to charge or the industry is sunk would be more persuasive if they said at the same time we have to add more value than we’ve been adding,” he said.

And, most industry experts agree, entertainment will be easier to charge for than news. It may be hard to prevent free distribution of an episode of “The Office” or “NCIS,” but the product is unique, with no substitute being created by someone else.

A small number of publications already charge for Internet access, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Newsday, Consumer Reports and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. But they tend to be either specialty products or near-monopolies in local markets, and they generally do not charge enough to fundamentally alter their profit pictures.

But for most general-interest news, any paid site would be competing with alternative versions of the same articles, delivered by multiple free news sources.

“One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs,” Mr. Mutter said. “They should have executed them. They wouldn’t have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive.” (end story)
One thing not addressed here is the success of electronic versions of what used to be print. Many magazines such as Road & Track, Penthouse, Smithtonian, Photography, Field & Stream, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science to name a small few have a very successful e-version of their paper produce with enhanced electronic content, for example video and hyper links to advertisers sites and additional editorial content. Scientific American and Metropolis (an architectural magazine) have tried to run on a some what different standards then the most effective one which is Zinio and as a result their experience has been disappointing. Even the Zinio client can be frustrating as many publishers cannot seem to get their head or what ever around the idea of a digital and non physical product. I have a number of subscriptions were the company also sends me a paper copy of the magazine and after many appeals seems unable to stop or even find the paper subscription which I, very tiresomely, am still receiving. However that is only until renewal comes around and then those magazines don't get renewed. There is hope and life in publishing, the publishers just have to clue in.