Newspapers in decline, blogs not

This news doesn't really come as a surprise to anyone.

New York Times:

The industry reported yesterday a 1.9 percent drop in daily circulation, and a 2.5 percent decline on Sundays, over the last six months, compared with the period a year ago. The weak numbers for 814 daily newspapers, reported by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, represent the largest circulation losses for the industry in more than a decade, and indicate an acceleration of the decline. The rate of decline has been 0.5 percent to 1 percent since newspaper circulation peaked in the mid-1980's, analysts said.

Editor and Publisher:

USA Today maintained its crown as #1 in circulation, with a .05% gain taking it to 2,281,831 copies daily. The Wall Street, in second place at 2,070,498, was down .8%.

Compared to the same period a year ago, The Sun in Baltimore dropped a staggering 11.5% in daily circulation and 8.4% in Sunday circulation. On Friday alone, the paper lost roughly 14% of its circulation.

Meanwhile, blogs are not in decline:


That's not to say most of these blogs are not crap or actually contain legitimate news, but still, you get the point.

EDIT: Nice post and graph from the same source -- David Sifry, founder of Technorati -- that does show blogs catching up to "big media" in terms of legitimate stories, as measured by links to stories. The data are from October 2004, though; it'd be interersting to see new data like these and how much more ground blogs have gained.