Miami Herald Circulation Slips to Third in Florida, Down Nearly 50k Since Last Year

Here's news you won't be reading in The Miami Herald*: the daily, once the largest in Florida, has now shrunk to third in the state based on circulation, according to numbers released yesterday by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The Herald had settled into the number two slot behind The...

By Kyle Munzenrieder

October 27, 2009

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Here's news you won't be reading in The Miami Herald*: the daily, once the largest in Florida, has now shrunk to third in the state based on circulation, according to numbers released yesterday by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The Herald had settled into the number two slot behind The St. Petersburg Times, but now is also bested by The Orlando Sentinel.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel was fourth. The Herald now only outsells its Broward rival by fewer than 10,000 copies a day.

The Herald moved about 162,260 copies on weekdays between April and September of this year, down from 210,884 during the same period last year. That's a nearly 50,000-copy drop (or 23 percent), one of the greatest circulation declines in the country. On average, the circulation for dailies across the nation fell by 10.6 percent.

To give you an idea of how drastic the drop is historically, In 1950, the year The Herald won its first Pultizer Prize and the population of Miami-Dade was only about 495,000, the paper had a daily circulation of 170,000. Of course, that was in those long-gone pre-Internet times when the daily paper business model actually made sense.

*We're not saying the Herald wouldn't publish it, but if they did would you actually be reading it?

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