Is this the turning of the content tide? For months now we’ve been looking forward to seeing Steve Brill‘s model for regulating content with his new company JournalismOnline, which will be using a platform called Press+ to standardize pay walls for websites. We have yet to see JO work in practice, but other media companies are already jumping on the Press+ bandwagon, most recently the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania and the Enterprise-Record in California, which should be ready for the content provider come April or May, and be the first sites to test the new system. Both papers are owned by MediaNews Group, one of the largest newspaper holders in the country.

Read more

This morning, the Audit Bureau of Circulation released its six-month report for newspaper circulation in the U.S., reporting a dismal 10.62 percent drop in weekly circ across the board.

But it’s not all bad news. Some papers have actually seen growth, with the biggest increases coming from the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania (up 16.45 percent from April through September) and Women’s Wear Daily, which showed a 14.31 percent jump. This is good news for the Condé Nast-owned fashion trade, which became the latest pub owned by the media company to cut staff on Friday.

Other papers to show growth included Michigan’s Oakland Press (up 7.26 percent), the Las Vegas Review-Journal (6.56 percent), the Chattanooga Times Free Press (2.18 percent) and the Ogden Standard-Examiner in Utah (1.89 percent).

Of the top five gainers, The Wall Street Journal had by far the highest total circulation, coming in at 2.024 million as of September 30. That’s a small increase — 0.61 percent — over the same period last year, but enough to push the Journal to the number one spot in circulation over USA TODAY, which posted a 17 percent decline during the last six months.

Earlier: Latest Newspaper Circ Numbers Show Ten Percent Drop