The Drudge Report is highlighting the latest depressing data for the newspaper business:

• Overall newspaper circulation is down 2.6% over the last six months.
• Of the top 20 highest-circulated papers in the country, 16 experienced circulation declines within the last six months.
• 14 of those papers lost 1% or more of their readers.
• 11 of those papers lost more than 2.5% of their readers.

Stunning circulation losses of 5% and more hit five big papers: San Francisco Chronicle (down 15.6%), The Boston Globe (down 8.5%), The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (down 6.7%), Los Angeles Times (down 5.4%), and The Philadelphia Inquirer (down 5.1%).

Remember, this is over a period of six months. Year-over-year statistics will most likely look dramatically worse.

The good news was relatively limited: of the four papers that had circulation increases, none had increases of 1% or more.

Here’s the raw data, as reported by Drudge:

1. USA Today, 2,272,815, up 0.09 percent
2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,049,786, down 1 percent
3. The New York Times, 1,142,464, up 0.5 percent
4. Los Angeles Times, 851,832, down 5.4 percent
5. The Washington Post, 724,242, down 3.7 percent
6. New York Daily News, 708,477, down 3.7 percent
7. New York Post, 673,379, down 0.7 percent
8. Chicago Tribune, 579,079, up 0.9 percent
9. Houston Chronicle, 513,387, down 3.6 percent
10. The Arizona Republic, 438,722, down 2.1 percent
11. Newsday, Long Island, 427,771, down 2.7 percent
12. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., 398,329, up 0.9 percent
13. San Francisco Chronicle, 398,246, down 15.6 percent
14. The Boston Globe, 397,288, down 8.5 percent
15. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 365,011, down 6.7 percent
16. Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, 362,964, down 2.9 percent
17. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 350,457, down 5.1 percent
18. Detroit Free Press, 345,861, up 0.04 percent
19. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, 343,163, down 1.6 percent
20. St. Petersburg Times, Florida, 323,031, down 4.4 percent

Note: I am being a bit lazy by using the term “readers” and “circulation” interchangeably. In the newspaper business, circulation refers to the number of copies of each issue pushed out the door. Usually, the paid readership is substantially lower than the circulation, so the numbers above overstate the number of people who pay for each issue. On the other hand, some copies of those papers may be read by more than one person, so the number of people reading the papers—which is what advertisers generally care about—is likely to be higher than the paid circulation. But whatever the underlying numbers actually are, there’s no way this is good news for the newsprint business.