Today we're looking at American Newspapers Circulation which were released in the last few days. It's not a USA centric thing, it's more that the print sectors march towards digital there is evolving faster (in my opinion) than many of the countries in the world.
The Alliance for Audited Media (akin to the ABC here/UK) monitor a total of 593 newspapers across the States and they allow publishers to amalgamate both their paid copy sales and their digital unique or subscriptions so you can see the brand footprint of a title (neatly avoiding the word "newspaper"!).
The top 23 titles for March 2013 are in the table below and, without getting into data mining, I'll run through a few takeaways.
The biggest brand is the Wall Street Journal having a total circulation of 2.3m. It's biggest in the print league but second biggest in the digital table, topped for pole position by the New York Times.
USA today dropped into third position, primarily on the back of a 12% decline in its Newspaper Sales.
The NYT has the highest digital proportion of total circulation at 61% and that's behind a paywall.
Of the twenty three titles under scrutiny the average decline in print was 4% and the average increase in digital was 24% giving an average total circulation increase of 4%.
This is up from 27% when the titles were last surveyed in September 2012.
It would have to be said that the top papers are the pioneers in digital. Out of the five hundred odd titles surveyed, the average digital proportion is only 19.3% of total circulation across all titles.