As newspapers promote themselves during Newspaper Week (Oct. 15 to 21), they face a shrinking readership. They must make strenuous efforts to make their pages attractive to people while faithfully carrying out their duty of digging for the truth and contributing to people's right to know.
Japan's dwindling population and hard economic conditions, such as high unemployment and the spread of low-income temporary jobs, are causing the country's newspaper readership to decline. Ominous to the newspaper industry is the fact that many young people do not read newspapers. They probably think that they get enough information from the Internet.
In this age of rapidly changing tastes and interests, newspapers need to have sensitive tentacles to feel what people want. They must provide information readers feel like reading and present it in an attractive way. Unless newspapers succeed in producing products that convince people they are indispensable, they will have no alternative but to drop out of competition with other information providers.