The Washington Post has recently announced that it will be increasing the circulation of the EXPRESS at the one year anniversary of that “commuter paper,” from 150,000 per day to 175,000 per day.

DCist thought now was the perfect time for one of those misleading, alarmist bar graphs. While the circulation of its free, flaky tabloid paper may be up, the circulation of the real thing over at the Washington Post is decidedly not.
In fact, this week’s Washingtonian has a column by Harry Jaffe pondering “Why Can’t the Washington Post Keep Circulation Up?”. Jaffe’s sources “in the paper’s top echelon say both the publishing and news sides are close to obsessed by the declining circulation,” speculating last year’s nearly 3% decline in readership is caused from everything from competition from the free website and EXPRESS, to new migrants who don’t speak english. Meanwhile, Joshua Micah Marshall thinks it’s because the Post is stuck in a market of newspapers that are “polarizing towards a crop of, in effect, national newspapers and a larger universe of much smaller ones that are intensely local in their focus.”