Demography, which has disguised the extent of the problem so far, will eventually exacerbate it. Japan has a huge population of post-war baby-boomers and relatively few young people-indeed, so few children are being born that the population has started to shrink. At present the newspaper-loving baby-boomers are propping up circulation. When their eyesight fails, newspaper circulations are likely to collapse.
Advertising has already done so. Revenues were dropping even before the recession, in part because of those disappearing young readers, and are now falling quickly. NSK estimates that newspapers earned ¥565.5 billion ($6.2 billion) from advertising in the 2008-09 fiscal year, down from ¥858.4 billion in 1998. Megumi Tomita of NSK says papers have managed to make up for advertising losses by modernising their printing plants. But further savings there are unlikely. Soon, newsrooms will have to shrink.
Elsewhere newspapers are responding to the problem of flat or falling audiences by hawking more services to their remaining readers. British newspapers sell wine and online games. Last month the Wall Street Journal launched a travel agency. Such a strategy is not possible in Japan because the sales agents, not the newspapers, control access to readers. Those agents may also complicate efforts to sell digital newspapers on e-readers and tablet computers. The newspapers greatest strength could become an acute weakness.
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