Save the New York Times!

By Rick Moran

Would the last person reading the New York Times please turn out the lights?

The following circulation compares the new data to the same period a year ago. Daily circulation is the Monday-through-Friday average.

-- The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a whopping 9.2% to 1,476,400. The paper's daily circulation declined 3.8% to 1,077,256.

According to New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty, the company had budgeted for the declines in Sunday and daily circulation. Two-thirds of the Sunday loss stemmed from the elimination of bonus days and third-party bulk copies. Also: the paper had a single copy and home delivery price increase in July. The paper also focused on growing "highly profitable circulation," she noted.

-- At The Washington Post, daily circulation decreased 3.5% to 673,180 and Sunday dropped 4.3% to 890,163.

-- Meanwhile, daily circulation at The Wall Street Journal grew a fraction of a percent, up 0.3% to 2,069,463 copies. At USA Today, circulation inched up 0.27%* to 2,284,219. (Correction: the original version of this story said USA Today's daily circulation was up 2.7%.)

I guess people decided that they wanted to eat their Sunday breakfast without being interrupted by a wave of nausea after reading some typical New York Times bilge.

If this keeps up, the dinosaur media will become fodder for archeologists and story tellers ("Once upon a time, Americans got their news by reading something we used to call "newspapers"...)

I am happy to see that the Times "budgeted" for this catastrophe although their attempt to put a prom dress on a pig falls pretty flat as you can well imagine. And I suppose by "highly profitable circulation" the Times is talking about their efforts to get their own employees to subscribe to the paper. Perhaps they can branch out and start a subscription drive that would target employees' mothers. Now there's an untapped resource 'ole Pinch never thought of, I'll bet.

Really now, this is getting serious. Will it get to the point that we will no longer have the New York Times to kick around anymore? American Thinker's Editor Thomas Lifson would be bereft. AT's News Editor Ed Lasky would get writers' block.

So we here at AT have decided to start a campaign:

SAVE THE NEW YORK TIMES!

To all our readers, we ask you to subscribe or give generously to the Times just so that we have something to write about in the future. This site would grind to a halt if the Times went out of business so we are asking you to save the Times - and save AT.