This statistic illustrates the share of readers of The Washington Post in the United States in the last two weeks. As of **************, ** percent of 18 - 29 year old consumers do so in the U.S. This is according to exclusive results from the Consumer Insights Global survey which shows that ** percent of 30 - 49 year old customers also fall into this category.Statista Consumer Insights offer you all results of our exclusive Statista surveys, based on more than ********* interviews.

The Washington Post's credibility fared relatively well in 2022, with a survey revealing that 48 percent of respondents believed the publication to be very or somewhat credible. The Washington Post’s credibility rating was slightly lower than that of The New York Times, and the paper also lost out to The Wall Street Journal in this regard.

The Washington Post

Founded in 1877, The Washington Post has been running for over 140 years and has won a number of Pulitzer Prizes for its employees’ editing, criticism and reporting work over the last century. The publication is one of the leading daily newspapers in the United States, and its circulation figures are good considering the decline of print media in recent years. The Washington Post has moved with the times and made the necessary shift towards digital along with many print outlets, with positive results. The newspaper has a large number of digital only subscribers worldwide and is among the most popular news brands in the United States. The Washington Post frequently ranks in the top five news brands in terms of monthly users, along with the likes of The New York Times, CNN and FOX News.

The Washington Post is perhaps best known for its coverage of the Watergate Scandal in the 1970s led by reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Whilst several attempts were made to discredit the newspaper’s investigations and subsequent reports, many consider the Post’s investigation of Watergate to have significantly contributed to President Nixons’s resignation.

The New York Times had **** million digital subscribers as of February 2025, making the publication the global leader in this regard, followed by Substack and The Wall Street Journal with **** million and *** million online news subscribers respectively. Digital subscriptions – the future for news publishers? Subscriptions were cited as the most important digital revenue stream for publishers worldwide in every year from 2021 to 2023, ahead of advertising. As subscriptions have increased, customer retention has also become a growing concern, and according to the aforementioned subscriber losses experienced by The Washington Post, is a well-founded one. Retaining paying members is crucial to achieve growth, and publishers must keep abreast of their users’ needs and industry trends in order to do this. The challenge to achieve sign-ups Converting readers to becoming paying subscribers to news products is challenging. Even video streaming services are experiencing churn. A 2022 survey revealed that ** percent of U.S. subscribers aged 18 to 34 years old canceled between *** and five subscriptions in the three months running up to the survey. If consumers are sacrificing more popular entertainment subscriptions to save money, news subscriptions could also suffer. In fact, ** percent of U.S. subscribers canceled their news subscription* in the last year, a figure which could grow higher as the recession worsens and trust continues to fall.

In 2024, the average weekday print circulation of The New York Times was approximately ******* copies, less than half the figure recorded in 2014. In that year, the company ceased publishing its figures based on weekday circulation for print, online, and other digital platforms, and published only its print circulation. The New York Times The New York Times was founded in 1851 and has been a household name in the United States for decades. The newspaper has adapted well to changes in the media industry, and between the final quarters of 2014 and 2020, paid subscribers to The New York Times’ digital only news product increased from *** thousand to over ************. The New York Times is also one of the world’s leading podcast publishers, with unique streams and downloads of the company’s podcasts reaching tens and sometimes even hundreds of millions per month. Popularity and reliability As one of the most popular news websites in the United States, the NYT has been known to achieve ** million unique monthly visitors, outperforming the likes of NBC News, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. That said, like many news publications, The New York Times has been the subject of controversy over the years. From accusations of liberal bias to its hiring practices, the newspaper has faced challenges regarding not only its published content but also its employees. In spite of this, just ** percent of respondents to a survey seriously doubted the credibility of The New York Times, with most finding the publication to be a reliable source.

The newspaper with the highest print circulation in the United States in the six months running to September 2023 was The Wall Street Journal, with an average weekday print circulation of 555.2 thousand. Ranking second was The New York Times, followed by The New York Post. The paper in the ranking with the highest year-over-year drop in circulation was The Denver Post with a decline of 25 percent (although Buffalo News recorded a higher drop, data does not refer to September 2022 to September 2023, see notes).

A comparison between data from July 2019 and data from July 2020 reveals changes in consumption patterns for content created by the news aggregator Huffington Post in Italy. Average unique daily internet audience of the platform, in fact, decreased in terms of PC and tablet access, but the consumption of Huffington Post's content via smartphone increased considerably. As a result, average unique daily users increased overall in July 2020 compared to the same period of the previous year.

As of 2018, the National Enquirer, an American tabloid newspaper, had a total circulation of around *** thousand readers. The publication’s overall circulation has experienced year after year of decline, with the total number nearly halving since the *** thousand reported in 2014. In addition to the recent struggles grappled with by many print media publications, the National Enquirer has experienced added difficulty due to its alleged involvement in a multitude of recent scandals.

 Newspaper industry

Thanks in part to the growing popularity and influence of web-based news sources, print newspapers have suffered decades of declining readership and circulation. The problem doesn’t seem to lie in the content or quality of these publications, but rather in the added convenience and accessibility offered by digital news platforms. Even the most successful publications in the United States such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have seen their circulation decrease. Despite the struggles of the print format, many newspaper brands have introduced digital versions of their products, some of which have acquired hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a relatively short period of time.

In 2024, The New York Times Company generated over 506 million U.S. dollars in advertising revenue, marking a small increase from the previous year but also a clear improvement from the lower results in 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, The NYT’s subscription revenue continued to grow and surpassed 1.6 billion U.S. dollars for the first time in 2023. The New York Times print circulation According to the company’s financial reports, the average paid weekday print circulation of The New York Times remained above 340 thousand in 2021. A separate report ranked The NYT among the leading newspapers in the United States in terms of weekday print circulation, with more than double that of The Los Angeles Times or The Washington Post. Whilst it is true that The NYT still has considerably more print copies in circulation than other papers, the figures are not what they once were. Back in 2000, The New York Times had an average weekday print circulation of over 1.1 million, and even in 2015, the number was still above 600 thousand. Further annual decreases can be expected as online news content, paid or otherwise, now takes precedence over printed publications. Digital readership The New York Times’ digital subscribers hit the five million mark in the final quarter of 2020, up by around 1,500 from the end of 2019. The company did, however, see a drop in its satisfaction rating between 2019 and 2020. Consumer satisfaction with online news brands generally fell in that time period, but The NYT saw the biggest decrease, losing six points year over year.

A total of 35 percent of adults in the United States taking part in a survey in February 2022 viewed HuffPost as a very or somewhat credible source of news, whereas 26 percent had heard of HuffPost but had no opinion about the outlet's credibility.

HuffPost

Originally founded in 2005, the Huffington Post, which markets itself as ‘the original online newspaper’ and is now known as HuffPost, offers articles and opinion columns mostly relating to current politics. HuffPost has significant followings among people of all age groups, offering liberal-leaning content to readers around the world. The company’s focus on digital forms of publication rather than print media has helped it to become one of the most popular news platforms on smartphone devices.

Fake news

Since the popularization of the term and concept of fake news by Donald Trump in the lead-up to the 2016 Presidential election, the phrase has been used to describe news stories with supposedly biased or incorrect information. As sites pushing false narratives have spread across social media and the internet in general, credibility of news publications has become increasingly important to readers. Regardless of the intent, the fake news phenomenon has led the public to be more skeptical of the news they hear, and more the half of adults view fake news as a serious threat to democracy in the United States.

The graph presents leading newspapers in the United States in January 2015, by number of unique visitors. WashingtonPost.com ranked fourth with a digital traffic of ***** million unique visitors in January 2015. In total, there were more nearly **** million online newspaper readers in the U.S. in 2014.

In November 2024, Fox News ranked first among the most popular multiplatform conservative and right-wing websites in the United States with over 91 million unique visitors from mobile and desktop connections. Outkick ranked second with approximately 7.71 million unique monthly visitors.