Newspaper Circulation Down
by Brian Reich | 9 May 2006, 2:00am
No surprise that print newspaper circulation continued to decline, according to data released on Monday. In fact:
Of the 25 biggest papers in the country, 20 reported drops in circulation. Of the five that did not drop, the gains were all less than 1 percent. Those were USA Today (2,272,815), The New York Times (1,142,464), the Chicago Tribune (579,079), The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., (398,329) and the Detroit Free Press (345,861).
I start each morning reading newspapers — the Washington Post, Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, the LA Times, and the Chicago Tribune — but I read all of them online. I do read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in print, but only because I like having something to read while waiting for the bus. On days when I drive into the office, I read those papers online. Its just a personal choice to have something in my hands for the commute, not a deliberate choice to support print.
Newspaper publishers spin the drop saying it is part of a strategy to push more information online where advertisers find greater value. If that is true, then the strategy is working becuase “newspaper-run Web sites had an 8 percent increase in viewers in the first quarter,” according to an article in the Tribune. “The data …found that newspaper Web sites averaged 56 million users in the period, or 37 percent of all online users in the period.”
Here is more coverage from the Boston Globe, Seattle PI, and LA Times.
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