TOKYO, March 14, 2024—In January 2024, a newspaper publisher specializing in covering newspaper industry printing marketing and technology went bankrupt quietly. Its circulations of two top papers had been decreasing over years to the level where the company no longer could not continue paying for newsprint, ink and printing machines. There’s more than what the demise of Japan Printing News Co., Ltd. underneath.
Catering to the newspaper industry’s newsprint marketing and technical divisions, this small company founded in 1950 at one time was in hot demand for its papers that reported on printing technologies, industry trends and other industry insider topics. It began experiencing a steady slide in circulation after the newspaper industry’s circulation peaked around 2000, with the shrinking condition accelerating from around 2000 – in close lockstep with the newspaper industry.
The failure was no isolated incident for daily national newspapers. Proof of the industry’s plight, total daily newspaper circulations plummeted to almost half from 53.708 million in 2000 to 28.590 million copies in 2023, and down 2.256 million copies or 7.3 percent – a record year-to-year decrease – from 2022, according to the Japan Newspaper Publishers Association’s statistics on Dec. 26, 2023. Per household circulation was 0.49 and circulation per 1,000 people was 270, down 28 copies from 2022.
Still, the data looked impressive for a country with the population roughly 1/3rd of the United States when compared to less than 20 million copies of daily newspapers read by U.S. audience, an estimate based on a Pew Research data. Comparison analysis aside, the Japanese circulation fall looked dead serious in absolute terms as electronic subscriptions are farm from sparkling in Japan, with the Nikkei economic daily’s totaling not even 1 million.
The 2023 circulation plunge occurred a year before the so-called 2024 newspaper industry crisis is set to grip it: The renewal of existing newsprint printing machines that have almost reached their end-of-life and forcing even national dailies to consider business strategies to avoid huge investments for new machines, such as going on-line alone, sharing printing presses with rivals, or mergers.
If ever, the primary reason why national dailies have been able to continue printing independently owed something unique only to Japanese newspapers: The legal mandate to deliver daily newspaper copies to all subscribers no matter how far and difficult to reach their homes even in fowl weather on a same day basis. This forced newspapers to run their own printing presses, transport the printed papers as fast as possible on their respective delivery trucks, and finally deliver the papers to each house, in competition with rival newspapers.
But that requirement is registering wear as the industry experiences tumbling ad revenues on top of crashing circulations. In 2000, ad revenues aggregated 1.247 trillion yen ($8.3 billion). In 2021, it was 381 billion yen ($2.5 billion). What’s that drop? Much of the decrease went to Internet ads.
Readership migration to smart phones and PCs to read free (and subscription fee paying) news articles is one of the factors contributing to the newspaper readership shrinkage, for sure.
But I find that fundamental reasons are lurking in content. When I flip through newspapers – Yomiuri, which boasts the largest circulation, Asahi, the second, Nikkei, the economic daily, and sometimes others, I used to feel overwhelmed by rich content – stories about politicians, bureaucrats, financial and monetary policies, new tech developments, and so on, plus overseas news researched and written nobly by staff correspondents. I would have to spend at least a couple of hours to go through them all.
What now? I scan at headlines and flip through pages perhaps in 10 minutes per paper. On March 13, 2024, all newspapers headlined articles about a failed rocket launch of the Japanese spapce company, Space One. It was very shallow to me, very little about launch technology and other details. It must have been only 20 minutes before I tossed the three papers onto the table.
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