This morning the Audit Bureau of Circulation released its newspaper-circulation numbers for the six-month period ending in March 2009. The results weren’t pretty: Every single one of the top 25 largest papers in the country declined in circulation except for The Wall Street Journal, whose numbers grew by roughly half a percentage point to just over two million. Its fellow top-ten newspapers, including USA Today, the Washington Post, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Houston Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times, shrank from 1 to 13 percent. The New York Post, which, like the Journal, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., lost 20 percent of its circulation — more than any other publication in the top 25. Though it is still the sixth-largest paper in the country, that puts it nearly 50,000 readers behind its direct competitor, the Daily News (their readerships are at 602,857 and 558,140, respectively).
