Flash quiz: what is the highest-circulation English-language newspaper in the world?

(Hint: Rupert Murdoch doesn’t own it.)

The correct answer, as you are likely aware, is the Times of India, which has a circulation of 4.3 million, and reaches an average of 7.64 million readers with each issue.

While money may not exactly be growing on trees in the news industry these days, the 174-year-old title, published by family-owned media conglomerate Bennett, Coleman & Company (B.C.C.L.), is planted in fertile soil: it is the most widely read English-language daily in a country where newspaper circulation is rising by 8 percent per year overall, and 1.5 percent per year for English-language newspapers.

Just over a year after The New York Times’ digital subscription model was launched, it provides the company with “incredible” audience data, the company’s chairman and CEO Arthur Sulzberger says at WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Europe conference in London.

A total of 454,000 people have subscribed (not including print subscribers), and Sulzberger says much of the scepticism that abounded when the plan was first announced has since subsided. Given the number of media executives who have visited the paper’s offices over the last year, he expects many more payment models for digital content to be unveiled before long.

As well as the obvious financial benefit, Sulzberger noted that a key advantage of the subscription model is what it tells the paper about its audience’s reading habits.

Through the subscription model the Times has learnt that at the beginning of the day, many subscribers go to the Times in any format – print, tablet, phone or web – to scan the headlines. During the day, they look at the web or their smartphones, and in the evening they return to the print or tablet editions. The same subscribers tends to access the paper across multiple platforms, with different motivations, and the challenge now is to find better ways to deliver content most effectively across all devices, Sulzberger said.

Denver Post editor Gregory L. Moore announced in a note yesterday that the paper is now putting local news on the front page. “Every day except Sunday, the front page and the first part of Section A generally will be devoted to our metro report, what we call Denver & the West. This change is an effort to reflect our continued emphasis on local news, including our business report,” he writes.

Why is the Denver Post making the switch? Andrew Phelps at Nieman Lab points out that “the Post’s national content is typically provided by The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Often, these are commodity stories, stories that readers can easily find elsewhere on the web — and, in many cases, stories that readers aren’t seeing for the first time in the morning paper.” So it doesn’t make sense to put them on the front page, when the Post could be giving greater exposure to its most original and community-focused content - content that readers can’t find elsewhere. 

Moore confirms this idea, telling Phelps, “we really want to promote the fact that we are spending an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to promote our local communities, and this demonstrates it better than any words can say.”

Which publications are read where? A collaboration between Forbes and Bitly analysed millions of clicks on Bitly shortened links shared on the Web to explore which news sources are read where across the US.

Bitly is a website which shortens URLs, making it easier to share them on the Web. It is widely used on Twitter for example, where saving space is crucial to get the most out of 140 characters. Bitly provides also tools to track links: by adding a + at the end of a link, it’s possible to see how many times the link was clicked on, Bitly explains.

The data collected for Forbes have been aggregated to form an interactive map showing America’s most influential news outlets.

As Forbes’ Jon Bruner explains, Bitly’s dataset consists of every click on every Bitly link on the Web mainly shared on social networks like Facebook or Twitter. For Forbes – Bitly said – they investigated how people consume news by looking at how people in different states differ in their preference for news sites.