As more people turn to the Internet for news, a loss of add revenues that coincided with the financial crisis has led to heavy losses for US newspapers in the past few years.

"The average weekday sales down almost 9 per cent since the same time last year," said the New York Times, which is also suffering the same decline as most other newspapers except the Wall Street Journal.

Compared with a year ago, The Journal was up 0.5 per cent, the only newspaper among the 25 largest to experience a weekday increase.

The Journal's numbers were helped by the 414,000 paid subscribers to its electronic editions including its website, according to the NYT.

With the exception of the Journal, most American newspapers do not charge for their websites yet and their online readership is not included in the circulation bureau's calculation (Audit Bureau of Circulation), although their paid subscriptions to other electronic editions are included.

The Journal's slight gain helped the paper widen its lead over USA Today for the largest circulation over all, 2.1 million to 1.8 million.

The latter used to be the largest paper in circulation before losing it to The Journal last fall.

On Sunday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported sales dropping 6.5 per cent and weekday sales 8.7 per cent compared with the same six-month period a year ago.

The figures are based on reports filed by hundreds of individual papers, according to NYT.

"The decline was widespread, as nearly all of the major newspapers and many of the smaller ones lost circulation," it said.

Among the 25 largest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle suffered the most, losing 22.7 per cent of its weekday sales.

In the last year, circulation at The New York Times dropped 5.1 per cent on Sunday, to 1.4 million copies, and 8.5 per cent on weekdays, to 950,000.

The Los Angeles Times declined 7.6 per cent on Sunday and 14.7 per cent during the week. The Chicago Tribune fell 7.5 per cent on Sunday and 9.8 per cent during the week.