Herald Circulation Tumbles

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I think we should coin a term here on Riptide for when we blog about the miseries facing The Miami Herald. "Herald in a Barrel"? You know, how like in the great depression days people got so poor they had to wear barrels to hide their nudity? Ok, no. Heraldpocalypse? Anni-Herald-ation? Yeah, the only one I can come up with that's any good is slightly offensive. So, scratch that.

Anyway, Editor & Publisher reports that the Herald's circulation has plummeted 15.8% in the past six months, and 13.1% for Sundays. They're barely keeping their daily circulation above 200,000. 2,122 papers above to be exact.

The average paper fell off 7%. It's worth noting, if only to illuminate the point that papers that keep up their quality are facing smaller drops, that The New York Times dropped only 3.5%, The Washington Post lost only 1.6%, and The Wall Street Journal actually saw an increase in circulation of 0.6%.
Of course, those papers have national circulation, but besides the quality issue it also give you a little hope that people aren't necessarily scrapping their subscriptions to all papers as fast as they can.

As for the Herald's online edition, a quick glance at Quantcast, which monitors Herald.com directly, shows that the number of overall monthly visitors to the sight is slightly up in the past six months. However, the number of pageviews is actually down, as are page views per person.