Writing up the ABCs today, rather than my usual patch of ABCes, was certainly an eye opener. I'm accustomed to writing up how many more hundreds of thousands - or even millions - of unique users and page impressions have been recorded online month on month.
Trawling through chart after chart of month-on-month and year-on-year percentage decreases for national newspapers was extremely sobering. Curse the Daily Mail's barely perceptible increase of a full 36 copies from October 2005-6 - which stood in the way of an all-out dead-tree annihilation headline. Maybe.
It's arguable whether the Sunday Sport really counts as a 'news' paper but it looks very much like the days of tits, arse and fictional hamster stories are drawing to a close: circulation has dropped nearly 30 percent in the past year from 148,000 to 104,000.
But that's small fry. The big one here is the Sun, whose daily circulation is now at its lowest point since 1974 when it was audited at just over 2.9m, we are reliably informed.
I flatter myself that I count as one of the "younger staff" Roy Greenslade referred to today who, he said "have never known the exhilarating pleasure of working for a paper that is on the rise. It puts a spring in the step."
Working entirely online gives you bad eyesight and a cheery radioactive glow, but the consolation is the spring that's getting springier with every step.
More reports on the ABC results here, anyway: Sun records lowest sale in 30 years FT bucks downward trend News of the World sales fall again London paper leapfrogs freesheet rivals Sunday Times pays for price rise
