By: Mark Fitzgerald
In an otherwise lackluster FAS-FAX circulation report released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the
New York Post and
The Wall Street Journal stood out with significant gains -- Rupert Murdoch's feisty tabloid for its sixth consecutive reporting period of double-digit growth, and the national business broadsheet for an eye-catching 16.1% year-over-year increase that is almost totally accounted for by paid subscriptions to its online version.
With the addition of some 686,000 paid online subscriptions to its essentially flat print circulation of 1,800,650, the
Journal moved back over the 2 million circulation mark for the first time since the Reagan administration and recorded its highest circulation in its 114-year history: 2,091,062.
This was the first time that Dow Jones included paid WSJ.com subscribers in its ABC circulation numbers. ABC rules allow for electronic editions of daily newspapers to be counted as paid circ -- if certain requirements are met.
Gannett's
USA Today remained the biggest-selling newspaper for the six-month period ended Sept. 30. Its circulation was 2,154,539 if calculated Mondays through Fridays. The paper's Friday edition, with its three-day shelf-life, remains far and away the nation's most popular weekend paper, with 2,616,824 copies sold -- nearly a million more than second place, the 1,676,885-circulation Sunday edition of
The New York Times.
The
Times' daily circulation was up just 0.5%, while the Big Apple's largest tabloid, the New York
Daily News, increased by a respectable 2.1% to 729,124. The biggest story in the city that never sleeps, though, was the
Post, which was up 10.6% to 652,426. With its gain, the tabloid nudged the
Chicago Tribune, which was flat at 596,667, out of seventh place on the top 10 circulation list.
Flat results were a dominant theme of the FAS-FAX report. As predicted in an Oct. 27 story by
E&P, the news events of summer were unable to move the dial on single-copy sales. The results were particularly striking in California, where the intense interest in the gubernatorial recall election failed to translate into significant gains for any metro daily.
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