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Weekly Fight newspaper collapses
By Zach Arnold | September 11, 2006
Yahoo Japan HP: “Pro-wrestling publication ‘Weekly Fight’ is ended”
By Zach Arnold
Kakutolog (in Japanese) has a shocking post about a media report in regards to the future of Weekly Fight, the weekly newspaper produced by Shin-Osaka Shimbun. The paper is being discontinued as of September 27th, which will apparently be the last issue of the publication. Weekly Fight was one of the most notable of the weeklies in terms of fight coverage on a national scale. It was considered an outlet friendly to K-1, but has been around as a newspaper since 1967.
The reasons listed for the paper being shutdown: Decline in readership, stagnant growth in the newspaper industry, and the fight industry declining rapidly in Japan.
Despite the tabloid nature of the newspaper, it’s a devastating sign of what has been a declining trend for media coverage in Japan of the fight industry. Combine this with all the shake-ups that have happened at Weekly Gong the last few years, and you have a recipe for a complete and total collapse of the Japanese fight media — a media outlet that was literally an institution since the 1960s.
Topics: All Topics, Japan, Media, Zach Arnold | 5 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback | Share This
Jesus, that sucks! There are some major problems with the fight industry. Or maybe because the advent of the internet, people could get info from the internet? Think about it, because have you noticed that Apter mags aren’t nearly as popular as they used to be?
Chuck – what makes Japan different from America or other bigger countries is the mode of transportation, which allows for newspapers, magazines, etc. to still succeed over there when paper products are dying a miserable death over here.
In addition, most of the traditional media outles have their own cell phone or web site subscription services, meaning they were offering content both on paper and in electronic form.
I think this story trends to a much bigger issue, which is the crumbling of the fight industry as we know it over there. To what extent things fall apart, I am not sure at all.
Good point. And to think, it was about a year and two months agop when NOAH had that tremendous Tokyo Dome, having a claimed 62,000+ fans, the biggest attendance for a wrestling Dome Show in how long? 5-7 years? And they are pretty much back to where they were. Theses companies are still doing fine enough to stay afloat it seems, but still.
[...] In the last several years, times have been tough for the various Japanese media outlets. As business has declined, so have profits and ultimately many publications have had to restructure their companies or lay off employees (as was the case with Weekly Fight newspaper). In one of the last issues of Weekly Fight, the newspaper made a claim that someone big in the fight industry was going to be arrested soon. This created a myriad of rumors and speculation as to which big name was going to be arrested by the police. There was all sorts of speculation (ranging from fighters to promoters). It appears that this speculation was misfocused. [...]
[...] Yoshihiro Inoue, the main boss behind the Weekly Fight publication that debuted in 1967 (backed by Osaka Shimbun) and shut down a few months ago, died at the age of 72 on December 13th at 1 PM in Osaka. The publicly stated cause of death was stomach cancer. Inoue’s “children” (such as Tarzan Yamamoto, Katsuhiko Kanazawa, etc.) became big players in the pro-wrestling media business. [...]
[...] Last year, we lost Weekly Fight. We could lose Gong Kakutougi this year, one of the major MMA magazines in Japan. The Japanese fight media that became so instutitionalized is falling apart at the seams. [...]