Suffers first ever double-digit decline over six months
By Toni Fitzgerald Oct 26, 2009
The circulation decline for U.S. newspapers got even steeper during the latest reporting period, hitting double digits for the first time.
Average weekday circulation fell by 10.62 percent during the six months ended Sept. 30 for the 379 daily newspapers measured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which released the data this morning. That marked a loss of more than 3 million copies per day, from 34,005,421 last year to 30,395,652 this year.
That's a much steeper decline than was reported in the last three periods. The period ending in March this year saw daily circ fall 7.09 percent, the period ended in September '08 was off 4.64 percent, and the period ended in March '08 was off 3.6 percent.
Sunday papers also suffered significant falloffs during the period ended last month. ABC figures for 562 papers found that circulation declined 7.49 percent, from 43,253,201 to 40,012,253.
Again, that was a much steeper dip than the previous three recording periods, which saw dips of 5.37 percent, 4.85 percent and 4.6 percent.
Circulation has been decreasing for years, obviously, but there'd been speculation that this reporting period would see even bigger drops.
For one thing, the recession has forced people to cut back on all sorts of extras, and that includes newspapers now that news is available via other free sources like the internet and cable.
Too, changes in the industry itself have hurt circulation. The Detroit newspapers, for example, cut back on delivery, and USA Today has been hurt by changes in its hotel programs.
As expected, the Wall Street Journal surpassed USA Today to become the nation's No. 1 newspaper, with an average daily circulation of 2.02 million.
