DeNA pulls eight online services amid reporting scandal

A company behind a health care information website under fire over inaccurate, plagiarized articles on Thursday said it had temporarily suspended operations of eight other niche online services. It emerged this week that articles on DeNA Co.'s website Welq were not properly fact-checked and that outside contributors were told to write stories by taking information from other medical websites and rewriting it. "It was seriously wrong to provide medical information in an inappropriate manner when it needed to be handled with extra care," said DeNA CEO Isao Moriyasu in a statement Thursday. BuzzFeed Japan on Monday revealed how DeNA, which is known for its mobile game business and professional baseball team, instructed its writers in a manual to create stories that are likely to top search engine lists, while also explaining how to rewrite information to avoid simply copying and pasting, which could draw accusations of plagiarism. As a result, the stories were a hodgepodge of information from various sites and lacked any attribution.