hi, my comment about credibility (or authority, influence, anything like that).
The writer of Techinsight just watched ayu's performance on Kouhaku and made a very personal comment on it. that's it.
As for the J-CAST article, its writer just quoted ayu's post in TA blog and, as truehappiness pointed out, just sourced some comments from yahoo!answers and youtube.
Both Techinsight and J-CAST are web-only media which doesn't have any relationship with traditional media such as newspaper and TV. And they are not ranked in the top 100 websites according to Alexa (
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/JP ).
Though livedoor.com (which re-posted Techinsight article) is No. 7 website in Japan according to Alexa, I guess it is because many users have their blogs on this site. The news page news.livedoor.com is just one of many news sites in japan. Its source is sometimes credible and sometimes tabloid-like.
Anyway, because ayu is still a big celebrity, we occasionally see this kind of articles and many comments to such articles from ayu fans and anti-fans.
and my additional comment is ... fans in Japan have been saying that ayu should have a less-hectic schedule and vocal training for many years, i believe. (but at the same time, fan of ayu in japan are now happy/unhappy because the 2010 tour will/will not come to their city
So, you know how ayu has been working so far. I believe ayu is doing, in general, what she'd like to do and what she thinks she should do as an artist.