Circulation is falling at most large-market Canadian newspapers, part of a continent-wide shift that is seeing readers get some of their news from websites instead of the printed word.
The paid-circulation numbers for the six months ended Sept. 30, released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, show just a handful of big Canadian newspapers have bucked the trend to selling lower numbers of papers.
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Le Devoir and La Presse in Montreal, Le Journal de Québec, the Toronto Sun, and the Winnipeg Free Press showed paid-circulation increases on weekdays compared with the year-earlier period. A few other papers — the Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen, for example — delivered more papers on Saturday or Sunday, even as their weekday numbers fell. But virtually every other major paper showed overall circulation declines.
The Globe and Mail's weekday paid circulation was down by only a few hundred copies, to 330,145, while its Saturday numbers fell less than 1 per cent to 412,688 from 415,608.
The National Post's weekday paid circulation fell about 10 per cent to 209,211 from 232,508. On Saturday, the Post's drop was 11 per cent to 228,896 from 256,300.
The Toronto Star, the biggest paper in the country, reported a 1-per-cent drop in weekday circulation to 446,493, a 1-per-cent drop on Saturday to 635,356, and a 0.5-per-cent fall on Sunday to 451,438.
While many newspapers are showing declines in circulation of their printed versions, they are gaining new readers for their Internet products, said Robert White, senior vice-president of the Audit Bureau's Canadian arm.
“Visits to newspaper websites are way up everywhere,” he said. “People are still going to a newspaper; they're just accessing it in a different format.”
The trend is similar in the United States, where new ABC figures showed average weekday circulation for 770 newspapers shrank 2.8 per cent in the six months to Sept. 30 compared with the year-earlier period, with Sunday papers experiencing a decline of 3.4 per cent.
But the websites established by the 100 biggest papers increased their total audience by about 8 per cent over the same period, according to research from the Newspaper Association of America released Monday. Some papers managed Web-audience gains of more than 20 per cent among 25 to 34-year-olds — the demographic group that analysts say are most deserting printed newspaper products.
In Canada, some newspapers are now getting ABC to audit the number of visitors going to their websites, Mr. White said. That practice is likely to spread, he added, as more advertising shifts to the Web.
Globe and Mail publisher Phillip Crawley said Monday that several regional newspapers have seen their circulation dented by the creation of free commuter papers. As a national paper, The Globe has not been affected by the “free sheets” as much, he said, and has managed to increase its circulation in the key category of subscribers who pay 50 per cent of the cover price or more.
