Print newspaper sales are plummeting as more and more news hounds abandon hard copies and turn to their cell phones, tablets, computers and TVs for up-to-the minute news.
Medium.com compared 2013 readership stats to 2015's from the nation's top 25 papers and found all of them have fallen dramatically – including the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.
A chart Medium.com put together denotes the publications' "total average print circulation" in 2013 numbers and compared them to those obtained from the Alliance for Audited Media (in September 2015) for “individually paid print circulation," the number of copies purchased.
The Wall Street Journal continues to be the nation's most widely read newspaper, but in the past two years, its daily distribution has fallen from 1,481,000 to 1,064,000. Only the WSJ and New York Times continue to sell over half a million copies daily. The rest of the nation's papers have fallen below that threshold.
According to Medium.com's chart, the Chicago Tribune, the nation's sixth largest, dropped in the past two years from 368,000 daily newspapers sold in 2013 to 266,000 in 2015 – a 38 percent decrease.
The Chicago Sun Times' readership also fell from 185,000 to 118,000, or a decrease of 36 percent.
The concern, Medium.com says, is whether or not the print newspaper demand will continue to drop or if, perhaps, the steep decline will soon plateau.
In the meantime, news consumers are finding their own preferred angles on the news handily via the Internet.
