David,

You shouldn’t really be all that worried about the “sharp decline.”

There isn’t much of a real decline. You see, for the past 20 years, newspaper publishers have been defrauding their advertisers with fake circulation numbers. This allowed them to raise advertising rates.

Some of them got caught recently, some of them got sued recently. Now, the public companies are walking the fraud back.

This doesn’t represent a staggering loss of readership. It merely represents what the readership was all along. You know – prefraud.

Where’s the SEC on this issue?

Nowhere to be found.