The circulation declines of American newspapers continued to accelerate over the spring and summer, as sales across the industry fell almost 3 percent compared with the year before, according to figures released today.
The drop, reported by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, reflects the growing shift of readers to the Internet, where newspaper readership has climbed, and also a strategy by many major papers to shed unprofitable or marginally profitable print circulation.
Among the nation’s largest newspapers, only a handful held their own or registered slight increases in overall paid circulation for the period from April 1 to Sept. 30: USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle and The St. Petersburg Times. Most papers showed significant declines, both weekday and Sunday.
For the first time, the Audit Bureau released, along with the traditional circulation figures, numbers produced by Scarborough Reports that reflected the total number of readers, both in print and online, for more than 200 newspapers in their home markets. For many of those papers, this marks the first time that such an independent analysis has been done, providing a benchmark for future reports.
Newspaper industry executives said they hoped that the new set of numbers would put a more positive cast on newspapers’ prospects than the routinely gloomy paid circulation reports have done.
“We do feel that there’s a story that’s been missed here,” said Stephen P. Hills, president and general manager of The Washington Post. There is good news about newspaper readership, he said, “but you wouldn’t know that to read the newspapers.”
An analysis of 88 major papers showed that in the last two years, about half of them had seen no change in readership or had registered an increase, said Bob Cohen, president and chief executive officer of Scarborough.
The industry is also hopeful that the new readership figures will make an impression on advertisers, who have broken with historical patterns by retreating from newspapers despite an expanding economy. Executives noted that newspaper Web sites — unlike their print counterparts — draw a lot of young adults, who are desirable among advertisers.
But advertisers have generally not considered an online reader to be as valuable as a print reader, so it remains to be seen what effect the revised numbers will have.
Across the industry, the new audit bureau report shows a 2.6 percent decline in paid weekday circulation from the year-earlier period for more than 500 newspapers whose figures were available, and a 3.5 percent drop on Sundays for more than 600 newspapers.
USA Today, the top-selling weekday newspaper in the country — it does not publish on weekends — had a 1 percent increase in circulation, to about 2.3 million.
Sales of The Wall Street Journal, which does not publish on Sundays, fell 1.5 percent, to about 2 million. The Journal is one of a very small number of papers that charges for access to most of its Web site, and the paper said today that online subscriptions, which are included in the paid circulation figures, have topped 1 million.
The New York Times, which has raised its price twice in the last year, in addition to shedding unprofitable sales, lost 4.5 percent of its weekday circulation (to less than 1.04 million) and 7.6 percent of its Sunday circulation (to 1.5 million).
The circulation of The Los Angeles Times may have bottomed out, after several years of some of the sharpest declines in the industry. For the second straight six-month period, weekday sales held fairly steady, at 780,000, but Sunday circulation dropped 5 percent, to about 1.1 million.
In New York City’s heated tabloid war, The New York Post fell slightly behind The Daily News in weekday circulation, as both papers posted significant declines, dropping below 700,000. The Post overtook The Daily News last year in weekday sales for the first time in decades. The News continues to lead in Sunday circulation by a wide margin.
