Very Late Age of Print

Newspaper circulation is collapsing. Year over year, the Boston Globe is down 18%, the SF Chronicle is down 26%, he LA Times is down 11%. Everyone is down; the NY Daily News shed 76,000 subscribes (down 14%), USA Today is off 17%.

The collapse of advertising in this economy has crippled papers, but these circulation figures are astounding. I knew the Globe was off, but I’d assumed this was a consequence of the NY Times’ corporate decision to reinvent the Globe as a sort of big neighborhood paper, the extremely Northern Suburban edition of the Times, and to shift readers of the front section to become NYT subscribers. The Boston Herald, however, is also down 17%.