Top U.S. newspapers posted further declines in circulation Monday with the exception of USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, which have held up better than others as more readers go online.
Apart from those two national dailies, which eked out gains of under 1 percent each, every other newspaper in the top 20 posted declines, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations for the six-month period ending in March.
USA Today, owned by industry leader Gannett Co., remained the top-selling paper in the country with an average daily circulation of 2,284,219, up 0.3 percent.
The Wall Street Journal kept its No. 2 spot at 2,069,463, up 0.4 percent. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought the Journal's parent company Dow Jones & Co. last December.
The New York Times was still No. 3 at 1,077,256, but that was down 3.9 percent from the same period a year earlier. The New York Times Co. also owns The Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune.
Newspaper circulation has been on a declining trend since the 1980s, but the pace of declines has picked up in recent years as reader habits change and more people go to the Internet for news, information and entertainment.
National newspapers like USA Today and the Journal have tended to hold their ground better, as have smaller-market dailies where competition from other media like the Internet isn't usually as intense.
Metropolitan dailies have suffered the worst declines, a trend that continued in the most recent reporting period, with the Dallas Morning News reporting a 10.6 percent drop to 368,313.
The Dallas paper's corporate owner A.H. Belo Corp., newly spun out of broadcasting company Belo Corp., said as part of its earnings statement Monday that the company was culling less valuable circulation such as copies distributed through third parties.
Other metro dailies also posted steep declines, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, down 8.5 percent to 326,907, and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, down 6.7 percent to 321,984.
Declines at some other major papers were less severe, with the New York Daily News narrowly keeping the upper hand on its crosstown tabloid rival, Murdoch's New York Post.
The Daily News posted a 2.1 percent decline to 703,137, while the Post fell 3.1 percent to 702,488. The Daily News had edged past the Post in the last circulation reporting period, the six-month period ending in September.
Both Murdoch and Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman are going after Newsday on neighboring Long Island, which Tribune Co. has decided to consider selling as it struggles with declining ad revenues and an $8.2 billion debt load it took on as part of a going-private transaction last December.
Newsday, meanwhile, posted a 4.7 percent decline in circulation to 379,613. Newsday circulates mainly on suburban Long Island near New York City.
Despite the persistent declines in print circulation, newspapers have also been attracting more readers to their Web sites, which, as many publishers point out, results in a larger total combined audience.
Earlier in April the Newspaper Association of America released a study showing that newspaper Web sites attracted an average of about 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter, up about 12 percent over the same period a year ago.
The problem for publishers has been turning that online traffic growth into revenues. Online advertising at newspapers grew 18.8 percent last year, according to NAA figures, but that wasn't enough to offset a 9.4 percent decline in print advertising. Total newspaper advertising last year, print and online, declined 7.9 percent.
The twice-yearly report from the Audit Bureau includes figures from most major U.S. newspapers but not the entire industry. At the roughly 530 papers that reported comparable figures for both periods, average daily circulation fell 3.6 percent in the most recent period.
Several smaller to mid-size papers posted gains, including a Spanish-language daily in New York called El Diario La Prensa, up 7.6 percent to 53,856, while The Times in Munster, Ind., owned by Lee Enterprises Inc., rose 3 percent to 86,195.
The Chicago Sun-Times, reporting for the first time since being censured in 2004 for circulation misstatements, posted circulation of 312,274, but no prior-year numbers were available for comparison.
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