I like to keep track of the newspaper circulations, which get updated twice a year by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. I though maybe you'd be interested as well?
All numbers are average daily circulation numbers.
* Biggest increase goes to the San Jose Mercury News, which jumped from the 26th largest paper to the 8th largest paper. Of course a jump like that means outside factors at play. In this case, it's because they've either closed or consolidated a couple of other papers (as of January 1, 2010), namely the #41 Contra Costa Times and the #91 Oakland Tribune. Even so, the Mercury News is up 5% from what the three papers were doing before, so that's good for the publisher.
* There is a noticeable trend that all the Florida papers are showing increases. I wonder if this is indicative of what I assume is an age gap between those who read newspapers and those who don't; Florida has the highest percentage of people over age 65 of any state.
* Other papers showing major increases are the Phoenix Republic, the Toledo Blade, the Tucson Daily Star, the Lancaster (PA) Intelligencer Journal, the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the Wichita Eagle.
* The largest decrease belongs to the Boston Globe, which is down 12% over the past 6 months. The only other paper in the top 100 which is down more than 10% is the Detroit News (the Detroit Free Press is also down, but not as much).
All in all, a slight increase among the top 50 newspapers. Not to say that the newspaper industry isn't doomed, but the drop in readership seems to have abated momentarily.
Good to see my hometown paper (Louisville Courier Journal) actually having an increase, but will be interesting to see if their power outage snafu that caused the morning after Kentucky Derby edition not to be delivered until Monday to most of it's subscribers (and caused people to lose their freaking minds if recent editorial pages are any indication) to follow through on their threats to cancel their subscriptions. http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20105040318
Also interesting to me that the Boston Globe wouldn't have been one of the top 10 or even 20 newspapers even if it had held steady over the time period. I would have thought they had a MUCH higher circulation given the area I thought they covered. Learn something new every day I suppose. I would also imagine that the decrease would have a lot to do with a lot of their good sportswriters defecting to ESPNBoston.com, but maybe I give too much credit to the Sports section.
"You are going to get a certain amount of snarkiness on the Internet no matter what, and my rule is that you don't post anything that you wouldn't say to someone's face." Marc Andreyko (Writer of DC Comic's "Manhunter")
Here's a bunch of stuff from the big convention this weekend. ----- Dan Didio STILL keeps saying that Wally West doesn't have much longer to live in the DC Universe... He's kinda pissing me off with that, but it IS starting to get funny.