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," DeNA CEO Isao Moriyasu said in a statement Thursday. BuzzFeed Japan on Monday revealed how DeNA, which is better known for its mobile game business and professional baseball team, used a manual to instruct its writers on how to create stories that are likely to top search engine lists as well as 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.