Oct 26, 2009

Falling, falling

If you pay attention to such things, no doubt you've seen the ugly numbers for national newspaper circulation. Editor and Publisher calculated an average drop of 10.6 percent for the six-month period ending in September.

From E&P:
The New York Times is down 7.2% to 927,851. Sunday fell 2.6% to 1,400,302.

The Los Angeles Times reported its daily circ is off 11% to 657,467 and 6.7% on Sunday to 983,702.

Daily circ at The Washington Post fell 6.4% to 582,844 while Sunday was down 5% to 822,208.


Daily circ at the Chicago Tribune decreased 9.7% to 465,892. Sunday was down 7.1% to 803,220.

The San Francisco Chronicle lost more than a quarter of its daily circ, down 25.8% to 251,782. Sunday was off more than 22% to 306,705.

Daily at The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J., dropped 22.2% to 246,006 and 18.5% on Sunday to 371,060.

The Boston Globe's daily circ decreased 18.4% to 264,105. Sunday lost 16.9% to 418,529.
American's newspaper, USA Today, fell 17 percent, putting it below the Wall Street Journal, which saw a light uptick of .6 percent.

Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur provides some context:

Following an average drop of 10.6% in the last six months, daily newspaper circulation has fallen to a pre-World War II low of an estimated 39.1 million, according to an analysis of industry data released today.

The first double-digit circulation decline in history means only 12.9% of the U.S. population buys a daily newspaper.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Time to hire more managers and execs to figure out how to fix the problem.

Anonymous said...

Yes it is time. Get rid of more workers and hire more execs and managers (make sure they have nice offices too) and the problems shall be fixed lickety-split!

Anonymous said...

You have my second, er, third on that.

-- The Math Editor

Mike Rappaport said...

It's interesting that they mention circulation is at a pre-World War II level.

Of course, there were fewer than half as man people in the country as there are now.