The Press: 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 yū-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...