The combined average daily circulation of the 25 largest audited newspapers in the US dropped 12.7% in the year to the end of September 2024, new data shows.
The figures, supplied to Press Gazette by the Alliance for Audited Media, show that none of the top US titles increased their circulation compared with the same period in 2023.
The largest year-on-year change came at The Los Angeles Times, which saw its average daily print circulation drop 25% from nearly 106,000 in the six months to 30 September 2023 to 79,000 in the same period in 2024.
That period does not cover the final weeks before the 2024 presidential election, when proprietor Patrick Soon-Shiong intervened to prevent the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. According to its own reporting the Times suffered several thousand subscription cancellations as a result.
Collectively the 25 papers in this analysis circulated 1.97 million issues per day on average in the six months to September, down from 2.26 million in 2023.
The 12.7% decline is somewhat shallower than a year earlier, when the top 25 US newspapers recorded a circulation decrease of 14%.
The highest-circulation newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, saw its circulation drop 14.7% from 555,000 to 474,000 – meaning no US newspaper now has a circulation in excess of half a million.
The Journal was followed by The New York Times (average circulation 250,000) and the New York Post (122,000), both of which recorded below-average circulation declines of 6.4% and 6.9% respectively.
The smallest declines were seen at Hawaii’s Honolulu Star-Advertiser (70,000, down 2.4%) and Florida’s Tampa Bay Times (61,000, down 2.7%). In all, six newspapers reported circulation declines of less than 10% in the year.
Of the ten papers with the greatest circulation decline seven are owned by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. The largest fall after the Los Angeles Times came at the Alden-owned San Diego Union-Tribune (30,000, down 22.5%), followed by four more Alden papers: the Hartford Courant (19,000, down 21.9%), South Florida Sun-Sentinel (15,000, down 19.7%), Denver Post (30,000, down 19.2%) and Chicago Tribune (61,000, down 17.1%).
Amid the ongoing decline of print several of these publications have seen far more success increasing their digital readership. The New York Times, for example, now boasts nearly 11 million digital-only subscribers (although a third of these do not pay for news) and The Wall Street Journal has 3.78 million.
At the end of September Gannett, which publishes USA Today, had two million digital subscribers and the Boston Globe had 260,000.
Several other publishers on the above table appear to have more than 100,000 digital subscriptions each but have not reported updated figures for some time. These include The Washington Post (2.5 million at the start of 2021, but reportedly down 10% following its endorsement scandal last year), Alden’s Tribune Publishing (436,000 at the end of 2020) and Hearst Newspapers (370,000 at the start of 2023.
[Read more: 100k Club — 2025 ranking of world’s biggest news publishers by digital subscribers]
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