Anthony Rausch's recent work looks closely at newspapers and journalism in modern Japan, focusing especially on the nature and significance of local newspapers. Though the local newspaper in Japan accounts for nearly half the consumption of newspapers overall, it has not been taken up and studied in any systematic way.
Japan's Local Newspapers: Chihoshi and Revitalization Journalism (Routledge, 2012) begins to remedy this by offering a careful examination of the local newspaper industry that pays special attention to the promise of a journalistic approach that Rausch calls revitalization journalism.
Japanese Journalism and the Japanese Newspaper: A Supplemental Reader (Teneo Press, 2014) collects several essays that offer interesting perspectives on the power of newspapers as historical and contemporary documents informing multiple areas of inquiry for scholars of Japan. We talked about both of these books for the podcast, and briefly surveyed some of the essays in the
Reader in the course of doing so. Enjoy!