The San Diego Union-Tribune, under new ownership in the last year, no longer features the old “Copley Ring of Truth” in the page 1 masthead. Now they have a statement along the lines of: “More than 1.374 million readers per week.”

Never mind that they used to sell more papers than that per day. But the U-T is not alone. Readers are abandoning newspapers in droves.

Below is a telling chart from The Awl.com.

Look at the incredibly swift descent of the Los Angeles Times — once considered one of the most prestigious newspapers in America (The tallness of the chart prevented me from grabbing it all — the vertical lines represent five year increments from 1990 to 2010).

I did some free-lancing for Times’ San Diego Edition around 1990. The only reason they even had a San Diego Edition, said some, was so they could say they had more than one million subscribers.

It was fun while it lasted!