Can You Say New Century Network in Japanese?

NCN -- the New Century Network -- is an increasingly distant memory, but one revived by the recent news that the top 3 national Japanese dailies are teaming up. Yomiuri, Asahi and Nikkei (the business daily of Japan) enjoy close to 30 million in daily circulation. That's a tribute to the intensive home delivery systems in place in Japan, a strategy that means that more than 50% of newspaper revenue is circulation-based. That's compared to the 20% or so in the U.S. and and 25-35 in parts of western Europe.

But the Japanese papers read the same handwriting on the digital walls. (Some good data on ad decline there, here.)

Older people are reading print, but younger people are using the web for news, and to news aggregators including Yahoo and increasingly, yes, Google. Yahoo's early Japanese partner was Softbank, which maintains a 40%-plus ownership stake. Yahoo Japan is still the search share leader there, according to a recent Comscore report, with 47.4 percent. ,And Google's movin' on up, rapidly, now claiming a 35 percent share, and having increased its search volume 53.3 percent in the last 12 months. (Yahoo's search volume is down 12.4 percent).

So three dailies are doing what U.S. dailies tried, and failed to do, in 1997-8. Their news portal (so far, unnamed) is set to launch in March, 2008, with links to each of the paper's individual sites. From afar, it looks like a half-baked strategy -- for 2008. In 2008, the web world in Japan and worldwide is so broad that to draw a circle around just three providers -- even the three biggest -- won't have the kind of impact  the publishers intend. They'll make it marginally easier for readers to find news, but other aggregators will be able to offer lots more, unless the news portal steps outside the boundaries of its owners' content.

Search/aggregation, after all,  is the preferred form of entry for most internet readers, and with news video coming on strong, search aggregators (who are of course harnessing video faster than print-based news companies) add to their advantage. 

That wasn't even much of an issue when the New Century Network almost got off the ground in the '90s. The memories of it are getting hazier, but I still recall The Last Supper of NCN, held in Denver (Brown Palace Hotel?) in 1998, soon after I'd joined Knight Ridder New Media. As I recall, the participants dined on bruised ego and the meringued illusion that newspapers companies would come to dominate the Internet.

Suspicious of each other, the heads of the nine chains represented couldn't get to a workable agreement, though staff had been hired, many mock-ups were in process, and a site -- NewsWorks -- had been built out. A good history of the project is here in the Business Week archives -- free of course.

The NCN debacle goes down as The Lost Moment in American daily history.

Of course, we all know the story by now: Content increasingly became commoditized and free, and newspapers have assumed a smaller and smaller role as the Web's come to dominate the publishing future. Decades-only business models are passing before our eyes, and looking ahead, daily publishers only see more pain.

Comments

[Mark Potts]

One of the great footnotes to New Century's history (mentioned in the BusinessWeek recap) is that there was supposed to be a tenth partner in the company: infamous Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Unfortunately, political machinations among the newspaper partners led to Kleiner being denied participation on the eve of NCN's founding. Having worked extensively as a consultant to NCN as well as for various NCN member companies and Kleiner and some of its companies, I think I can safely say that NCN's history and outcome would have been very, very different had that vote gone the other way.