You can call me myopic, but I tend to pay attention to any news that details the current health of the newspaper business. After all, it's all I've done for the past 22 years.

I was a little curious when I saw a listing of the top daily newspapers currently going. You can talk ad sales all you want, and they are what keeps us going, but the health of a newspaper is truly based upon its circulation. If you're not selling any copies, no one is going to want to advertise with you.

Here are the top 10 daily newspapers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation:

The Wall Street Journal- 2,293,798

USA Today- 1,713,833

The New York Times- 1,613,865

Los Angeles Times- 641,369

Daily News- 535,875

San Jose Mercury News- 529,999

New York Post- 522,868

The Washington Post- 462,228

Chicago Sun-Times- 432,455

Denver Post- 412,669

Most of those are no brainers. USA Today is sold across the country and The Wall Street Journal has a very specific, and large, target audience. And in a city of 12 million, The New York Times should sell 1.7 million copies. Actually, they should sell a lot more than that, and therein lies a lot of the problem.

And the Times numbers are massaged a little. That circulation takes into account visits to their website. In actual copy sales, they're way below a million a day.

Of course, these numbers are the kind that us in the small town newspaper business can't even begin to comprehend. They all sell more papers in one day than we will in, well, I can't count that high.

All those cities have a population of more than a million, or at least they do if you count all the outlying suburban areas, so while those numbers might seem impressive to us, they are cause for concern. Imagine if you had a potential audience of 2.5 million and only sold 400,000 copies.

And it only gets worse when a potential advertiser tells you they heard some TV show was watched by 1.6 million people and they were thinking of putting an ad there.

That's not quite the problem we have here. Aside from large chain stores, none of our potential local advertisers are going buy TV time. Our main problem is trying to put out news twice a week in a world where everything has to be known RIGHT NOW!

And believe it or not, that's a problem these big daily's have to deal with also. They might have a new edition hitting the street every morning at 5 a.m., but everything they've got has already been reported on by smiling TV news anchor or posted somewhere, usually incorrectly, on the Internet.

They use the same tactics we do to try and fight it. We post stuff to our website, send out a daily email and even having breaking news alerts you can sign up for. Our website gets a lot of hits (a LOT), and we have a couple thousand people signed up for the daily email and breaking news, but we always hear the same thing: "I saw that a couple of days ago on TV." Usually said when our Wednesday edition has something that happened over the weekend.

What's the point of all this? Not much, really. We're not in our death throes and our circulation rate is holding steady. We all sometimes whistle past the graveyard by saying, "What will we be doing five years from now when newspapers no longer exist?" Then we laugh.

Hopefully the saving grace, at least until I reach retirement age in about two decades, will be small town newspapers surviving because there's nobody else to report their news and keep an eye on their elected officials.

Sure, the really big stuff will always get reported on by somebody, but you're not going to see them sitting at town hall meetings to make sure a politician doesn't step across the line. You need us for that and we'll keep doing it as long as you'll have us.

michael.thomason@advocateanddemocrat.com | 442-4575