Hello, Japanese Wikinews celebrated her first anniversary today on July 14. Her sitenotice says "日本語版ウィキニュースは1周年を迎えました。" (Japanese Wikinews comes to her first anniversary) # If you feel it as problematic as Qur'an, feel free to contact us.
According statistics, there is 1071 pages in main namespace, 501 registered users and 9 admins including 2 bureaucrats. In my impression, all active contributors are registered and around 80 articles are submitted by month.
As pointed out recently, her community is still small and need to further growth. An user Peka analyzed Erik Zachte's statistics and found some interesting points. - Among 500 registered user, only 3.2% of editors (= 4 people) did its 75% of edits in a year, additional 5% of editors (=6 people) made 11.8%. (aph: It would suggest her frequent editors are equal to the group of active admins. ). On the contrary 52% of editors made one or two edits. This group is the biggest in population and their edits shared 1% of all edits in this year . - In her early stage, till November, around 100 articles were submitted by month. Since last November the average number of submitted articles per month decreased to around 50-80 (avg. 64); after then, no standing change has occurred and the number of articles has been constantly growing. - Among articles by country, articles concerning Japan are biggest in number (679 art.). Articles on USA(86 art.) and China (PRC) (40 art.) are next. By region, next to Japan alone (on Japanese Wikinews, Japan is treated not as country but also region due to its gravity of interest), Asia except Japan & Middle East (191 art), Europe (141 art) and North America (101 art) seems editors' interest. Oceania including Australia and South America are in opposition of those "favorites" regions. Unlike to English versions, Middle East is not frequently focused - it covered less frequently than Africa. In Japan, Tokyo is focused most among 47 prefectures, next Osaka and Okinawa are covered. It is remarkable Akita prefecture is the 5th most focused, which is usually considered not so a heavily press interest, and it is easily understandable one of most active editors is living in that prefecture. ;)
Details are found at: http://ja.wikinews.org/wiki/%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%8B%E3%83%A5%E3...
It will be a challenge for Japanese Wikinews to get more people involved, both inactive editors and newcomers. For involving the latter group, a new project has recently started on meta how to introduce Wikipedia editors who are interested in contributing breaking news to Wikinews editing.
Another challenge would be printable version though, there is no plan of periodical issuing except a proposal of "year book".
Btw, Spanish version seems to be more active than the global audience tend to think imo. They have issue a printable version weekly iirc.