The 20-Year Decline of Newspapers, in a Graph

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Oct 28 2009, 3:10 pm by Derek Thompson

Twice a year, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports the number of subscribers to each major newspaper. The Awl collected their data going back 20 years for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Daily News, and New York Post, and drew this really cool graph (after the jump). The WSJ is up over two decades. The New York Post is unchanged. The NYT sort of bobs around. Everybody else follows the general trajectory of a ball tossed off a 50-story building.

circulation

Stephen Dubner said at Monday's SuperFreakonomics event that decades ago, journalists assumed that if something went reported in the Washington Post or the New York Times, other papers were reluctant to follow because they assumed the story had been optimally publicized. Today the Wall Street Journal's circulation (including paying online readers) is more than the Washington Post and the New York Times combined.

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Comments (2)

ed October 28, 2009 3:15 PM

To be fair, both the WSJ and Times rely on national circulation for their numbers (the chart does not include USA Today).

While I don't know the latest numbers, the last I read was that the Times was below both the Daily News and the Post in the NY market.

mgoodfel October 28, 2009 7:37 PM

I think the age of subscribers and the percent of the population reading newspapers has been in decline since the 1970s. The papers were losing business to TV before they started losing even more to the internet.

The papers assume they are in the hard news business, and everything else is just padding. But people actually wanted the sports, comics, want ads, etc., as much or more than the hard news. Many people get enough hard news from 30 minutes of TV (minus commercials) a night.

Once all the other sections of the paper were done better somewhere else, the papers were trying to survive on just hard news. Which never paid the bills.