For newspapers, the hits just keep on coming

Unfortunately, not the kind of hits they'd like.

The latest circulation reports say that the big papers continue their accelerating collapse:

This is the fourth consecutive semi-annual report to register a severe drop in daily circulation and -- perhaps more troubling to the industry -- Sunday copies. While the estimated decline 2.8% for daily circulation for all reporting papers may seem negligible, consider that in years past that decrease averaged around 1%. Sunday, considered the industry's bread-and-butter, showed even steeper losses, with a decline of about 3.4%.

Some papers (we're looking at you, LA Times) are doing even worse:

The Los Angeles Times reported that daily circulation fell 8% to 775,766. Sunday dropped 6% to 1,172,005.

The San Francisco Chronicle was down. Daily dropped 5.3% to 373,805 and Sunday fell 7.3% to 432,957.

The New York Times lost 3.5% daily to 1,086,798 and 3.5% on Sunday to 1,623,697. Its sister publication, The Boston Globe, reported decreases in daily circulation, down 6.7% to 386,415 and Sunday, down 9.9% to 587,292.

The Washington Post lost daily circulation, which was down 3.3% to 656,297 while Sunday declined 3.6% to 930,619.

I looked around on the web and found a circulation report from 1999, showing the LAT has dropped 28% (300,000) in the past seven years, from 1,078,000 to today's 776,000.

It becomes increasingly difficult for marketers to use newspapers as their primary trade promotion medium -- leaving little choice but to rely ever more heavily on in-store promotion.