The combined average daily print circulation at 25 of the 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 US titles with the highest combined print and digital circulations increased their print 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.
The figures supplied to Press Gazette are for the 25 newspapers with the highest combined print and digital circulations, not the 25 newspapers with the highest print circulations alone.
This means that some titles are left off the list: for example, The Villages Daily Sun in Central Florida does not circulate a digital edition, but its average daily print circulation for the six months ending in September 2024 was 46,750, which would otherwise put it at 16th place on the top 25 list below. That figure was also 3% higher than the same period a year, which would make the Sun the only title to grow.
Of the ten papers with the greatest circulation decline seven are owned by investment firm 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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