Inky Print Circulation Continues to Decline

40,000 Sunday subscribers lost in just one year.

Print circulation at the Philadelphia Inquirer continues a precipitous decline, according to numbers released today by the Alliance for Audited Media.

As of March 31, the Inquirer has a Sunday print circulation of 324, 510 — down almost 40,000 copies from March 2013, when Sunday print circulation was 374,316 362,753.

Similarly, the Inquirer’s average weekday circulation was 166,104  — down from 189,260 copies a year ago.

Circulation for the Inquirer’s “digital editions” was up significantly over a year ago — 116,682 readers weekday, up from 55,638 a year ago. However, those editions are often included in a print subscription, but counted separately for circulation purposes, making it difficult to know how accurately they represent actual online readership of the newspaper.

The numbers do not include circulation numbers for the Daily News, which is a “branded edition” of the Inquirer. Those numbers will be released at a later date.