AJC loses 9 percent of its circulation. Oops.

That other newspaper in town, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has lost 9 percent of its circulation during the past six months, according to the trade publication Editor & Publisher. The official numbers, compiled by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), will be released next week. But extrapolating from the previous six month's report, the AJC's Sunday circulation is about 477,000 and daily is about 325,000.

It's no secret that dailies are in trouble. Overall, the dailies reporting to the ABC recorded circulation losses of 2.5 percent for weekday circulation and 3.5 percent for Sunday. In other words, the AJC managed to amass about triple the losses of its brethren.

The Cox executive picked to spin the staggering circulation decline, Robert Eickhoff, the AJC's senior vice president of operations, said the newspaper was "marching down a very strategic path."

Um, right. Sort of like describing Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, when his army of almost 700,000 men was reduced to 22,000, as "marching down a very strategic path."

In the AJC's case, in the last two decades the newspaper has lost 29 percent of its daily circulation and 27 percent on Sunday. Meanwhile, the Atlanta metro area has grown by about 70 percent.

A few other newspapers also had circulation losses in excess of 7 percent: the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Miami Herald and the Dallas Morning News.

Newspaper publishers for decades have been inventive about explaining big losses of readers. In the case of the AJC and the other big losers in the recent report, aside from the fact that they're all Sunbelt cities, they have one thing in common. None is putting out a newspaper of the quality it did in the past. Apparently, publishers haven't figured out that if you put out a good newspaper, people just might continue to read it.

Daily newspapers, faced with the awful publicity of never-ending circulation declines, are augmenting the ABC reports with numbers reflecting online readership. The AJC, for example, asserts that "combined unduplicated print and online market reach is more than 50 percent," according to Editor & Publisher. Maybe, but there's a big difference in someone clicking on one online story (and seeing no advertising), and the good old days when most of the city subscribed to the Atlanta newspapers.

To be fair, CL has the same issues in readership "migrating" to online. However, our print readership, as measured by the independent Media Audit, showed that during the last year-to-year reporting period, we've had a 15 percent increase in the number of people who read us each month. We now reach 796,900 readers monthly, an increase of about 100,000 from the previous year. Before someone at the AJC says it, yes, we're free. But we're classy.