Print Circ Has Falls 42% At Top Papers Since 2005

While the Alliance for Audited Media reported Tuesday that combined print and digital circulation at newspapers in the last six months fell by 0.7% on weekdays, print-only circulation actually declined by 9.9% in the same period at the 25 largest papers in the country. The AAM is an industry-funded group formerly known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Alan Mutter

The long-term circulation trend is sobering, according to Alan D. Mutter in his blog Reflections Of A Newsosaur.

The AAM archives show that weekday print circulation at the top 25 papers has plunged 41.6% since March, 2005, the year the industry achieved all-time high advertising sales of $49.4 billion. In a stunning reversal of fortune that has roiled the industry ever since, ad sales in 2006 commenced a seven-year slide that brought aggregate industry revenues to $22.3 billion by the end of 2012.  

As illustrated, weekday print circulation in the last seven years has fallen by more than half at the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Post, Arizona Republic, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Newark Star-Ledger, Orange Country Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and San Diego Union-Tribune.  Only one of the 25 papers on the list reported selling more print copies in 2013 than in 2005: The Tampa Bay Times.

Thus, the 25 titles that collectively sold 15.1 million papers on the average weekday in 2005 sold only 8.8 million papers on the average weekday in 2013.

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Mutter began his career as a newspaper columnist and editor at the Chicago Daily News and later rose to City Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, he became No. 2 editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the newspaper business in 1988 to join InterMedia Partners, a start-up that became one of the largest cable-TV companies in the U.S. Mutter was the COO of InterMedia when he moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to join the first of the three start-up companies he led as CEO.