Patrick Beeson

If you haven't heard of or read manga then you're fast becoming a minority. Or you don't visit your local Barnes and Noble/Borders/Books-a-Million on a regular basis.

But if you're working in the newspaper industry, you should pay close attention to what is happening to Japan's manga industry, as it is facing a similar downward turn in sales and circulation.

For those that don't know, manga is the Japanese word for comics or print cartoons. And despite it's recent losses, it comprises approximately 22 percent of all printed material in Japan according to Wired Magazine's recent story on the topic titled "Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex."

Wired cites a growing trend of young people turning to cell phones as the primary reason why sales of weekly comic magazines -- this is currently a $4.2 billion-a-year industry -- have fallen by about half over the past decade.

This news should already strike a familiar chord with the newspaper crowd -- the majority of print newspaper subscribers are over the age of 30.

Manga producers have found an extraordinary audience outside of Japan, which is why you'll see flocks of American teens and even adults browsing the stacks of your local chain book store.

But what is the Japanese manga industry doing to combat declining readership? Wired's story suggests the answer is by partnering with illegal, nonprofessional self-published manga known as "dojinshi":

For example, in both Japan and the US, one of the past decade's most successful manga series is Fullmetal Alchemist. The story pivots around a group of people with the ability to transmute matter into new substances. The main character is Edward Elric, a young man who possesses these powers. Another character is a father-figure type named Colonel Roy Mustang. At Super Comic City, there were at least 30 tables where amateurs were selling 20- or 30-page stories in which perfectly drawn, instantly recognizable Elrics and Mustangs discover their forbidden love for each other.

The manga industry's quiet tolerance of this unabashed copyright violation allows them focus-group like access into what the true fans like, and don't like. This is akin to the RIAA allowing Gregg Gillis, the artist behind Girl Talk, to mash and distribute with impunity.

The dojinshi producers are like the bloggers because they remix existing media to create something that's in many cases entirely new. They extend the story conceptualized by the original author.

Newspaper Web sites already syndicate their information via RSS feeds or through simple links. But if they extend this functionality through an API, or social network, then this could be taken to another level by outside developers and users.

One need only look towards companies such as Twitter and Google Maps for examples of what developers can do with an API.

This is definitely a risky business maneuver for an industry struggling to generate revenue through advertisements sold around said content. The information is made the product, and a new business model might need to be conceived.

But I think it's in many ways smarter than trying to anticipate the desires of the fickle newspaper audience, and failing further behind the pure-play Internet companies.