State of the News Media 2010 once again tells of the decline in circulation of the print editions of newspapers.1 It reports a decline of 10.6 percent in daily circulation from the previous year and a total of 25.6 percent over the previous 10 years. Furthermore, 2009's decline is more than the total decline from 2003 to 2007.2 The report says that the 15 newspapers with the largest circulations lost circulation except for the Wall Street Journal, which gained six tenths of a percent. Losses ranged from 5.5 percent to 25.8 percent for those papers and averaged 12.6 percent.3The report offered two glimmers of hope for community newspapers with small local circulations. It said, Small papers and weeklies generally beat the average.4 It also reported that unique visits to online sources increased 14 percent from the previous year.That small-circulation newspapers (that is, community newspapers) beat the average is nothing new. In the 1970s, newspaper circulation, which had been increasing for some time, dropped considerably. That precipitated a lot of speculation about the downfall of the newspaper industry. Yet the fact was that the circulation decline then was primarily among metropolitan newspapers. Between 1974 and 1982, 66 percent of the papers with more than 100,000 circulation lost circulation, but 63 percent of those with less than 25,000 circulation gained circulation.5Of course, media coverage and trade journal coverage always have focused almost entirely on the metropolitan newspapers, and that is largely true to this day. Analysis of what has happened to community newspapers remains hard to find in print. In 2009, The Pew report noted the closing of The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the financial difficulties of the Tribune Company, The Minneapolis Star and Tribune and the Philadelphia newspapers.6 In 2010, it added the difficulties of the New York Times Company with the Boston Globe, cutbacks in the number of issues by the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News and the move to weekly publication with online daily publication by the Christian Science Monitor.7 Largely absent from the report is breakout data about small-circulation dailies and weeklies, which make up the vast majority of newspapers in the United States.Surveys by the Scripps Survey Research Center and the Scripps Howard Newspapers have shown that more people in small cities read newspapers than do people in big cities. In 1995, 65.6 percent of the respondents in small cities read a paper four days a week or more, while for respondents in large cities the figure was 58.9 percent. By 2006 the figure for small cities had dropped to 52.6 percent, but that was still 5 percentage points higher than the figure for large cities.8Those losses occurred at a time of growth of online newspaper readership. A Pew study reported that between 2006 and 2008 print newspaper circulation dropped 8 percent, but online circulation increased 5 percent, with a net increase of 1 percent.9 Chyi and Lewis, in a study of 68 metropolitan newspapers, reported that online readership was 23 percent of print readership for the same newspapers.10 Chyi and Lasorsa, in a study of the Austin, Texas, market, found a clear preference for print over online for local newspapers, but a more even situation for national newspapers.11The available data do not tell us much about community newspapers, and the data about online editions do not tell us anything at all about community newspapers. Yet the Pew analysis indicates that online circulation is growing and that any assessment of how newspapers are doing must include information on online editions.12This study addresses that gap through a national survey by the Scripps Survey Research Center and the Scripps Howard News Service. The research questions suggested by analysis of the studies mentioned here are:RQ1:How does readership of print editions of metropolitan newspapers and community newspapers compare? …