日本报纸在风雨中蹒跚前行

过去几年发达国家的报社激烈竞争时，有这么一个发达国家的同行们却作壁上观。目前日本报业是全球最强的：读卖新闻早报销量1千万份，晚报销量360万份。日本报业乐于同政商保持非常紧密的关系，所以日本新闻是透露，而不是暴料。可是昔日的巨擎如今却处在风雨飘摇中。

AS newspaper companies across the developed world took a beating in the past few years, those in one rich country merely shrugged. Japanese newspapers are by far the world's biggest: Yomiuri sells 10m copies each morning and another 3.6m in the evening. Newspapers enjoy such close ties with politicians and companies that news in Japan does not so much break as ooze. Yet the giants are teetering.

The problem is not circulation, which has held up well thanks to a distinctive system of distribution. Virtually all Japanese newspapers are delivered by agents who work on commission, frequently turning up on doorsteps to collect money. People carry on buying newspapers in Japan for the same reason they keep paying for gym memberships elsewhere: pushy salesmen. Between 1999 and 2009 the combined circulation of morning and evening papers in Japan fell by just 6.3%, according to Nihon Shimbun Kyokai (NSK), the newspaper publishers' association. By contrast, American newspapers lost 10.6% of their paying readers between 2008 and 2009.

Yet the population of newspaper readers is ageing. Young people are less likely to read newspapers than their elders (see chart). Nor do they appear to be growing into the habit as they age, says Takashi Kasuya, an executive at Asahi, the second-biggest newspaper. Although Japanese newspapers have been careful not to put all their articles online free of charge, a generation has decided that the news it obtains from television, mobile phones and the internet is enough. The young have also come to dislike newspapers' clutter.

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.

Newspaper proprietors hope to reverse some of these trends. They are pushing newspapers in schools, hoping to get children used to reading them. Universities ask students to analyse newspaper articles as part of their entrance exams. Perhaps this will work. It is more likely, however, that newspapers' fortunes will begin to decline-more slowly than in other countries, perhaps, but bad news just the same.