Exclusive: Conservative Newspaper Circulations Surged As Liberals Tanked

Here is an analysis of today's widely reported news that newspaper subscriptions fell by the largest amount ever this year (cf: Big Metros Show Severe Declines in Latest Circ Report).

I did the research after noticing an anomaly in the data: the conservative New York Post was the only major paper to record any significant rise in circulation this year, and it was quite large. I then looked at the trend over a number of years and detected an extraordinary trend: every newspaper consistently lost subscribers, except for four which experienced solid growth. Three of those four are the nation's only conservative dailies, while the fourth is arguably the least partisan paper, USA Today.

While the trend is consistent across all newspapers, I will list below the data for the largest papers, which have the most statistically significant time range (2002-2006).

Liberal Newspapers:

Publication	2002	2006	% Loss
NY Times	1,113,000	1,086,798	-2.35%
LA Times	965,835	775,766	-19.7%
Washington Post	747,066	656,297	-12.1%
Chicago Tribune	596,667	576,132	-3.4%
NY Daily News	714,127	693,382	-2.9%
Houston Chronicle	551,914	508,097	-7.9%
Newsday	578,911	413,579	-28.6%

Centrist Newspaper:

Publication	2002	2006	% Gain
USA Today	2,135,321	2,269,509	6.3%

Conservative Newspapers:

Publication	2002	2006	% Gain
Wall Street Journal	1,801,087	2,043,235	13.4%
NY Post	589,897	704,011	19.3%

The only reliable Internet data for the conservative Washington Times shows nearly 3% annual growth in 2005.