• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, October 25, 2010

The most recent round of declines may have been smaller, on average, than previous years, but there's no getting around the fact that newspaper circulation continues to fall at a pretty good clip. The latest circulation report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, covering the period from April-September of this year, has total daily newspaper circulation down 5% from the previous year for the 635 publications tracked by ABC, while Sunday circulation fell 4.5%.

That compares to a 10.6% drop in average daily circulation and a 7.5% drop in Sunday circulation for the same period from 2008-2009, and an 8.7% decline in average weekday circulation and a 6.5% decline in Sunday circulation in the previous six-month reporting period from November 2009-March 2010. Over the last decade, total daily newspaper circulations have declined about 34% from 56 million in 2003 to 37.1 million this year.

As in previous years, some of the biggest newspapers took the biggest hits, with one notable exception: The Wall Street Journal, now the nation's largest newspaper in terms of daily circulation, which grew 1.8% to just over 2.06 million in the last six-month reporting period (in both print and digital editions). The WSJ's print circulation slipped 0.3% to about 1.6 million, but this was more than offset by growth in its digital editions, up 10% to 449,139.

Aside from WSJ, there wasn't much good news to be seen, with daily circulation tumbling 8.7% at The Los Angeles Times, to 600,449; 6.4% at The Washington Post, to 545,345; 5.5% at The New York Times, to 876,638; and 3.7% at USA Today, to 1,830,594.

Losses were even more pronounced among big regional newspapers. Newsday tumbled 11.8% to 314,848; the San Francisco Chronicle 11.2% to 223,549; the Houston Chronicle 10.5% to 343,952; and the Denver Post 9.1% to 309,863. The losses at the Denver Post are especially noteworthy, as it doesn't seem to have benefited from the recent demise of the Rocky Mountain News, at least in terms of daily circulation.