TOKYO - Japanese publisher Diamond Inc. has decided to end the print edition of major business magazine Diamond Weekly and move it entirely online from April as the company seeks to focus on in-depth business reporting sought by working professionals, its president said.
"Our roots are in business journalism. We decided to go digital to protect that," Aso said in an interview with Kyodo News.
"Business professionals want the latest news. Digital has a huge advantage over a weekly print magazine in terms of speed, and offers far more opportunities to connect with readers," he said.
The publisher, founded in 1913, announced the weekly's digital shift in August, having stopped selling Diamond Weekly at bookstores in the spring of 2025 and providing printed copies only to subscribers.
The gradual changes came amid a prolonged decline in Japan's weekly magazine market, with print sales falling to an estimated 51.3 billion yen in 2025, roughly one-eighth of their peak in the 1990s, according to a publishing industry research institute.
Aso said his company began preparing for a digital shift in 2019, when it merged the editorial teams of Diamond Weekly and its online news platform, Diamond Online.
"The purpose was clear. We believed digital would become the main battleground," he said, although adding that discontinuing the print edition was not part of the plan at the time.
As digital subscriptions grew rapidly, the company found that the two platforms attracted markedly different audiences. Print readers tended to be older and favored articles about personal finance and lifestyle, while online subscribers were mainly working professionals drawn to investigative reports and in-depth features on major companies and industries, he said.
"Such coverage is at the heart of business journalism and is also what readers want," Aso said, adding that it was natural for the publisher's reporters to become increasingly drawn to Diamond Online.
With the online platform generating far more revenue than the print magazine, Aso said it made little sense to keep devoting experienced staff to print production. The company decided to concentrate its editorial resources on digital.
While ending the print magazine marks a significant shift for the publisher, Aso stressed that the company was not abandoning print altogether, with book publishing remaining its largest business division.
"We will choose the optimal format for each medium. It is simple," Aso said.
Looking ahead, Aso said the publisher plans to make video the starting point for its editorial content, adapting it into audio, text and summaries to reach readers in different formats.
"We aim to beat AI with 'multimodal' editing," he said.
