Running out of Boypower

In Japan, the custom of supplying the newspaper reader with two editions a day, seven days a week--once before asa-gohan (breakfast) and again before yu-gohan--goes back nearly a century. Last week, whatever paper they read, Japan's subscribers were managing to get along without every other Sunday-evening edition.

The publishers' mutual decision to lop off two Sunday-evening issues a month was prompted by sheer necessity. The papers were simply running low on boypower. The supply of newsboys who plod their routes day after day is declining along with the country's population, and the press is confronted with a chronic and growing shortage of young carriers. To compound the problem, the newsboys, less than satisfied with an average take of $13 a month, have been steadily defecting for better pay elsewhere in the country's boom economy.

Despite the drop in deliveries, the papers held the monthly subscription rate at $1.25; and to their relief, they drew only scattered murmurs of complaint. At Asahi Shimbun, the country's biggest daily (circ. 5,100,000), only 20 or so subscribers, said an executive, "registered unhappiness." By such evidence of reader imperturbability, the association was encouraged to hint that even greater deprivations are in store. Before the year is out, said a spokesman, the Sunday paper in its entirety, morning and evening, may be a thing of the past in Japan.

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