What's the most popular name for newspapers?

Factual Questions
1

There are a few generic names that are common to many newspapers. There’s a Times, for example, in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Washington, New York, Denver and Bangkok have a Post. Lots of smaller towns have Gazettes, and Phoenix used to have one.

And if you include compound names, those get even more popular – Seattle’s got the Post-Intelligencer, Chicago’s got the Sun-Times, etc.

So what name is the most common in the newspaper world? Times? Post? Dispatch? Courier? Journal? Something else?

There’s got to be a statistic on this somewhere. A list of the most popular in order would be even cooler.

2

Kidon Media Link indexes just about every newspaper in the U.S. that has a web presence. Within the state lists of news outlets, look for “NP” to the left of the title that indicates a newspaper.

My guess is that it will be a close race between “News” and “Times”, with “Journal” in third place.

3

I think there is a flaw in your question – do you mean major papers, or all papers?

I used to have a job where I had to mail things to newspapers, and I found that most cities had at least one of each (Journal/Record/Post/Times/Register/etc.), but that many would have smaller circulations.

For example, the big paper in the big city near you might be the Springfield Record, with a daily circ of 90k, but there’s probably the smaller Springfield Post-Herald with a daily circ of 15k, and the weekly Springfield Shopper with a circ of 4k.

And the definition of ‘Major’ papers is fuzzy as well: there is a Washington Post, which gets about a million readers daily, and the Washington Times, which gets about 100k. 100k is still a pretty big newspaper, but it’s not thought of being as massive as the Post.

Historically most cities had 2 major papers, but for various reasons, (not the least of which is the expansion of Gannett, which uses Walmart-style tactics to crush smaller papers.) this is not the case any more.

For what it’s worth…
Among the top 100 newspapers by circulation, there are:

19 News (4 of which are Daily News)
12 Journal
10 Times
10 Post
8 Tribune
6 Star
6 Herald
5 Sentinel
5 Press
3 Gazette
3 Dispatch
3 Review
3 Sun
3 Union
2 Chronicle
2 Bee
2 Register
2 Telegram
2 Observer
1 Globe
1 Blade
1 Advertiser
etc…

The list I used is here:
http://www.accessabc.com/reader/top100.htm

and remember that this includes compound names like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and that some papers team up for Sunday papers, which gives them a higher circulation than they’d get the rest of the week.

4

oh yeah, I only used US papers, because I couldn’t find a list of international – plus I don’t know as much about them!