Editor and Publisher Magazine:
Here are the top 25 newspapers in the country ranked by daily (Monday-Friday) circulation for the six months ending September 2009 from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The percent change compares the same six-month period ending September 2008.
Go here for more on this list by E&P Senior Editor Jennifer Saba, and here for a list of the top 25 papers on Sunday. For a list of the top 10 gainers this time around, go here.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — 2,024,269 — 0.61%
USA TODAY — 1,900,116 — (-17.15%)
THE NEW YORK TIMES — 927,851 — (-7.28%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES — 657,467 — (-11.05%)
THE WASHINGTON POST — 582,844 — (-6.40%)DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) — 544,167 — (-13.98%)
NEW YORK POST — 508,042 — (-18.77%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE — 465,892 — (-9.72%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE — 384,419 — (-14.24%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER — 361,480 — N/ANEWSDAY — 357,124 — (-5.40%)
THE DENVER POST — 340,949 — N/A
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC — 316,874 — (-12.30%)
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS — 304,543 — (-5.53%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES — 275,641 — (-11.98%)The PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND — 271,180 — (-11.24%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS (e) — 269,729 — (-9.56%)
THE BOSTON GLOBE — 264,105 — (-18.48%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS — 263,810 — (-22.16%)
THE SEATTLE TIMES — 263,588 — N/ASAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE — 251,782 — (-25.82%)
THE OREGONIAN — 249,163 — (-12.06%)
THE STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK — 246,006 — (-22.22%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE — 242,705 — (-10.05%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES — 240,147 — (-10.70%)
The Boston Globe’s circulation is down 18 percent in one year; the San Francisco Chronicle’s is down 26 percent. The WSJ is actually stable. But these slides and the readerships they now represent are hard to ignore. They are not signs of an industry as we have known it in trouble. They are signs of it ending.
I think we’re witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren’t there. At some point, industries enter a death spiral: too few consumers raises their average costs, meaning they eventually have to pass price increases onto their customers. That drives more customers away. Rinse and repeat . . .
For twenty years, newspapers have been trying to slow the process with increasingly desperate cost cutting, but almost all are at the end of that rope; they can’t cut their newsroom or production staff any further and still put out a newspaper. There just aren’t enough customers who are willing to pay for their product what it costs to produce it.
The numbers seem to confirm something I’ve thought for a while: we’re eventually going to end up with a few national papers, a la Britain, rather than local dailies. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times (sorry, conservatives!) are weathering the downturn better than most, and it’s not surprising: business, politics, and national upper-middlebrow culture. But in 25 years, will any of them still be printing their product on the pulped up remains of dead trees? It doesn’t seem all that likely.
Tom Blumer at Newsbusters:
That the four grievously biased papers identified in the three previous paragraphs are among the serially worst performers especially supports the notion that while the Internet and technology in general have clearly been factors in the print industry’s decline, bias in its various forms — leftist slants, annoying PC language, and the suppression of stories that don’t fit the conventional “wisdom” template — have also contributed to the accelerating decay in many instances. Simply put, they don’t get it, and they’re paying dearly for it.
Kevin Williamson at National Review Online
It’s over. The advertiser-funded model of daily newspapers is now circling the drain.
Today’s Audit Bureau numbers also disprove one of the theories that newspaper ideologues have floated in recent years: that the larger “regional” papers – like the Timeses of NY and LA and the Post of DC – would emerge to gobble up the readers of other dying dailies in geographic proximity to become healthy regional giants. The data clearly demonstrates that that ain’t happening at all.
When the topic comes up, this final generation of daily newspaper editors and reporters typically takes its hands off its eyes and ears just long enough to blurt out a rant about how “bloggers” can never replace newspapers. But before one can engage them with, say, real facts (those mere props in the US daily newspaper mythology) about other news sources that are growing and thriving today (like this online newspaper you’re reading right now, much more diverse in our models than blogs only), and the different methods we use to investigate and report the news, these Cro-magnons typically go back to the monkey-see monkey-do pose as if in tantrum to express that they’re not listening.
In their increasingly public ruminations about why this is “happening to them” there is zero self-reflection about the biggest factor behind their demise: That they have lost credibility with their former public. Asking “why” just isn’t done in polite company. The big dirty secret that they must deny at all costs is that they did this to themselves by abandoning the interests of the majority of the public in favor of targeting only those readers with expendable cash that advertisers want to reach.
Which is why it is particularly poetic that, for example, the Miami Herald, which had transparently become what I’ve long called “Oligarch’s Daily” in its efforts to pander to the wretched refuse of the oligarch diaspora in Southern Florida, saw its circulation fall over the last year by 23 percent to just 162,260: it now reaches only three percent of its 5.4 million metropolitan area population. Those numbers simply are not sustainable to keep fielding a gaggle of professional simulators like Frances Robles to pretend to be “journalists” in order to disinform the US public about events in Latin America. The pink slip begins its inexorable journey into hers and others’ hands. It truly is only a matter of time.
There are days when this online newspaper exceeds the daily readership of most of those US dailies, and we’re not even close in sheer numbers to those like Markos Moulitsas and Andrew Sullivan who out-gun all of them every single day in circulation.
The number proved unexpected dire for the newspaper business, and – prospectively more frightening – could turn out to be a systemic, rather than simply cyclical, change. With more news readers getting their data from digital sources, chances are high that newspapers simply never recapture the lost audience for their products. And while newspaper, obviously, have made the push into online models, they don’t get to capture any lost revenue on a dollar-for-dollar basis.
