Circulation decline speeding up

By Reynolds Staff on Apr 28, 2009 in Basics, Uncategorized

Figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show that newspaper circulation for the six months ending March 31 fell 7.1 percent, according to The New York Times.
That’s an increase from the 4.3 percent and 3.6 percent drops over the previous two six-month periods.

Of the top 25 newspapers in the United States, all posted declines in circulation except for The Wall Street Journal, which eked out a 0.6 percent gain, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. For the others, the declines ranged from 20.6 percent for The New York Post, to a slight 0.4 percent drop for The Chicago Sun-Times.

The Audit Bureau also showed, however, that the number of unique visitors to newspaper websites is still increasing.
The sites combined to draw 73 million unique visitors per month in the first quarter of 2009, a year-over-year increase of 10.5 percent.
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The Reynolds Center, created through generous grants from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation of Las Vegas and operated by ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is dedicated to improving the quality of business and economics coverage through training programs for business reporters and editors.