■THE TEAM

■What is SoraNews24?

SoraNews24 is a Tokyo-based news site. In 2008, our sister site, RocketNews24 published its first Japanese-language article, and two years later came the start of our English site, which originally existed exclusively to translate articles from our Japanese colleagues. Over time we’ve expanded the amount of English-language content we produce while maintaining a focus on fun, weird, and intriguing news from Asia, particularly Japan.

Because of that, we decided to give the English-language RocketNews24 a very special eighth-birthday gift: the new name of SoraNews24. Sora is the Japanese word for “sky,” representing our commitment to bringing coverage of modern and traditional culture from Japan and Asia to people around the world, no matter which part of the sky we share that you happen to be living under.

■SoraNews24 Japan Facts and Figures

  • News blog based in Tokyo, Japan, launched on Dec, 2008.
  • Offers coverage on a wide variety of news subjects such as ‘Interesting News From Around the World’, ‘Entertainment’, ‘Technology’, ‘Video Games’, ‘Anime’, ‘Manga’, ‘Gourmet’, ‘Animals’ and ‘How-to’
  • Monthly page views: 50,000,000. Unique-users: 10,000,000 (Google Analytics)
  • Alexa world ranking: 2277, Japan ranking: 147
  • Currently contributing articles to a number of sites such as Yahoo! Japan, Microsoft MSN, excite, and BIGLOBE.
  • Nominated for the 2010 Japan Alphablogger Award