Weeklies have been biggest newspaper loss in recent years

Rural Blog - Most U.S. newspapers lost in 2004-15 were weeklies, mostly small ones, but weeklies still dominate industry The Rural Blog by Al Cross / 40min // keep unread // hide Insights Add note

"Closures and mergers resulted in a net loss of more than 1,800 newspapers from 2004 to 2015, the overwhelming majority of them weeklies," Ohio University Journalism Professor Bill Reader writes in the Newspaper Research Journal. "But community weeklies remain the most common (70 percent of all newspapers), and community dailies and weeklies account for 62 percent of overall print circulation."

Reader's article shows the true landscape of American newspapers, which have usually been defined by the dominance -- and recently, the tribulations -- of metropolitan dailies, but he points out that fewer than 2 percent of newspapers are metro dailies, "which account for less than 30 percent of overall print circulation."