Rust Belt cities may have shrinking populations, but their newspapers have a big traffic edge over Sun Belt peers

Traffic data for the United States’ largest local newspapers shows big gains for Gannett, the impact of national news on local sites, and one way the Rust Belt still beats out the Sun Belt.

Since July, we’ve been ranking the 25 local papers with the highest monthly web traffic, based on data from Similarweb, and we’ve got two months of data for you this time, covering August and September. The headliners on the monthly Top 25 remain relatively consistent from month to month: The L.A. Times retained its No. 1 spot, befitting its position as the most national of local/regional newspapers. From July to August, 7 of the top 9 papers remained in the exact same positions; the other two simply swapped spots. Since these rankings started, no more than 2 of the Top 25 have been new each month.

That doesn’t mean that a newspaper’s traffic is simply a function of its market size. We’ve already discussed at length the overperformance of Advance Local newspapers, which take up 8 of the 25 spots despite mostly sitting outside the country’s major metros.

But even setting Advance Local aside, some very large markets seem to regularly underperform smaller fry. For example, Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston are the 4th and 5th largest media markets in the country. But The Dallas Morning News and Houston Chronicle have never ranked higher than 24th in any monthly ranking. (And giving the DMN credit for all of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s traffic would only bump it up to the mid-teens.) Atlanta is the No. 8 market in the United States, but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has yet to crack the top 30 in any month. These Sun Belt giants have booming populations, but all those new arrivals likely feel less connected to local news than multi-generation residents in the Rust Belt.

Within the Top 25, August’s biggest mover was The Indianapolis Star, which moved up 8 spots to No. 20 with a 32% traffic increase over July. Outside the Top 25, top performers included The News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington (traffic up 45%), The News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware (up 29%), The Columbus Dispatch (up 23%), and The Courier-Journal of Louisville (up 19%). Other than Tacoma (McClatchy), each of those is a Gannett newspaper.

In September’s numbers, the biggest wow came from the Deseret News, the Salt Lake City daily owned by the Mormon church. It came in 14th in June, 21st in July, 26th in August — then zoomed up to No. 7 in September, growing visits by a whopping 97% month-over-month. Editors there didn’t respond to my request for further details on the growth, but it doesn’t take Google Analytics to suppose the Sept. 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah was a major factor. A couple weeks later, the church’s president Russell M. Nelson died at age 101.

Other big September gainers included the Austin American-Stateman (up 36%), the Detroit Free Press (up 29%), The Arizona Republic (up 25%), The Columbus Dispatch (again! up 28%), and the Fort Myers News-Press in Florida (up 72%). All five of those are, again, Gannett papers — a nice early-fall traffic bump for the nation’s largest newspaper company.

One other booming Gannett paper was The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, where traffic was up 63% in September. Executive editor Mark M. Konradi told me that the biggest driver was, as is unfortunately the case, a sad story: two men found hanging from trees on the same day. “We were very aggressive in creating unique and unduplicated content around that story,” Konradi said.