Newspaper Circulation: WSJ, USA Today Manage To Buck Trend

America's two biggest newspapers managed to tread water, but just about everyone else showed signs of sinking in the most recent release of numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, No. 1 and 2, respectively, in weekday circulation, were both up by less than 1 percent for the six months ending March 31. But after that, it gets ugly. Every other paper in the top 15 lost circulation, with the Dallas Morning News breaking the double-digit mark. (Its weekday average was 368,313, down 10.6 percent year-over-year.)

Below are the numbers released this morning; Editor & Publisher has more here.

USA Today
Circulation for six months ending March 31 2008: 2,284,219
Pct. change vs. 07: 0.27

Wall Street Journal
2,069,463
0.35%

New York Times
1,077,256
-3.85%

Los Angeles Times
773,884
-5.13%

New York Daily News
703,137
-2.09%

New York Post
702,488
-2.35%

Washington Post
673,180
-3.57%

Chicago Tribune
541,663
-4.44%

Houston Chronicle
494,131
-1.79%

Arizona Republic
413,332
-4.70%

Newsday
379,613
-4.68%

San Francisco Chronicle
370,345
-4.20%

Dallas Morning News
368,313
-10.59%

Boston Globe
350,605
-8.34%

Newark Star-Ledger
345,130
-7.38%

Comments

[billddrummer]

Just a continuing migration from print-based to web-based information delivery systems. The faster the old-line publishers beef up their web content, the faster they will be able to offset ad revenue losses in print with web-based click-to-pay revenue streams. Another opportunity for Google to exploit.

[Donald E.L. Johnson]

Newspapers continue to turn off half of their potential readers with unprofessional, biased reporting and editing. When will they get the memo?

[Joe]

If this trend would accelerate, one possible explanation why people
change their media habits and consumption might be have to do
with this (in editor & publisher):
Where Was Media When Sub-Prime Disaster Unfolded?
If we were long on the edge of "disaster" with a "financial nuclear winter" waiting in the wings, why were American news consumers among the last to know?
"...A New York Times columnist even admitted that experts and advocates first warned them in 2001 that predatory lending practices were devastating poor neighborhoods but the issue was not covered in any depth for five years. ...
...the (NY) Times business section ... and the Washington Post
... stories explained that the downfall was sparked by the use of overly complex securities designed not to be understood. ..."
www.editorandpublisher...

(Now: who on earth needs papers that manage not to understand
on the highest (media) level; ironically speaking: some sort of "electrically lit barbarians" ?)