News-Record.com

That'd be U.S. newspaper circulation:

NEW YORK -- Daily circulation fell 2.8 percent at U.S. newspapers in the six-month period ending in September, an industry group reported Monday, the latest sign of struggle as newspapers try to hold on to paying readers.

Sunday circulation fell 3.4 percent in the same period, according to the Newspaper Association of America's calculations of data supplied by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The latest decline is in line with a long-term trend of falling circulation as newspapers battle with ever-increasing demands on readers' time as well as rapid changes in reading and advertising habits due to the growth of Internet use.

... New York's two fiercely competitive tabloids were the only papers in the top 20 to win circulation gains in the period. ...

Separately, the Newspaper Association of America also reported that, according to its analysis of online traffic data from Nielsen/NetRatings, nearly 57 million people visited newspaper Web sites in the third quarter, up 24 percent from the same period a year ago. That figure made up 37 percent of all Internet users.

This news comes as a number of us here review this blog post at Online Spin from Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda. He says, basically, that the battle is on, right now, for the local advertising dollar between local news organizations and giants such as Google and Yahoo ... and that about 95% of that market remains, for the moment, in play. His suggestions for how newspapers should respond:

• Expect ongoing 5% year-over-year drops in print revenue and ongoing 25% year-over-year increases in online revenue ... and allocate resources accordingly. Now.

(He seems to see little value in bringing print people over to online, which may be overkill (even Rob Curley started in print), but his point is that print is a drag on online at this point, culturally and perhaps also financially.)

• Make newspapers "the place where everything local is posted, shared, discussed, criticized, or mashed up." We're working on that, albeit at -- for me, at least -- a frustratingly slow pace.
• Make your site one-stop shopping for everything in your area, so as to be more attractive to advertisers. That doesn't mean you produce all the content, but it does mean you aggregate and link out like crazy: "Someone needs to aggregate every site and every page and every blog with any local connection onto local ad networks to create the kind of massive scale that advertisers want. This is already done on the national level; it should be done at the local level."

I'm not involved much with the business side of things, but I choose to be encouarged by the fact that this piece was sent to me by Kathy Lambeth, who oversees News & Record Interactive and is involved with the business side.

Now, I don't know whether these suggestions are too little, too much or just right. But they sound right, inasmuch as they 1) align generally with what our readers (particularly the more tech-savvy among them) have been asking us to do and 2) align with our own plotting and planning over the past couple of years. That doesn't mean he's right and it doesn't mean we're right, but it is an encouraging data point.