MassLive has spun a small-market newspaper into a web traffic powerhouse

I didn’t think it was possible, but it turns out I wasn’t generous enough to Advance Local.

A few weeks back, we released our first monthly traffic rankings for U.S. local newspapers, and the big takeaway was the dominance of Advance Local, the chain that owns the dailies in Cleveland, Harrisburg, Newark, Syracuse, Birmingham, and a variety of other mostly unsexy American cities. In June’s data, Advance papers took 7 of the top 11 spots, beating out their peers in much larger markets. I laid out some of their strategy — statewide sites, an early digital focus, and a quick trigger in stepping away from print. (I could have added a lot of national aggregation, pop culture coverage, and a high story count.)

But it turns out I wasn’t giving them enough credit. You see, these rankings are based on traffic data for a list of about 250 papers, including every daily newspaper published in the United States’ 100 largest metropolitan areas. Since we’d only be reporting the top 25, I figured that was a safe cutoff point; after all, a market smaller than Toledo, Chattanooga, or Spokane wasn’t going to drive more web traffic than a place like Houston, Atlanta, or Denver, right?

Well, mea culpa. I didn’t account for the Advance Local magic.

Springfield, Massachusetts, is a city of 155,929 people, anchoring the 117th-largest metro area in the United States. It is neither the country’s largest Springfield, its most famous Springfield, or its most recently newsworthy Springfield. And yet the Advance-owned newspaper there, The Republican, somehow gets more web traffic than the New York Daily News, The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the Charlotte Observer, and a long list of other papers with NFL teams to cover.

That traffic goes to The Republican’s website MassLive.com — yet another example of Advance taking a city-bound print brand and blowing it up to state scale in digital.

Had I included MassLive in the previous rankings, which were based on June traffic data, it would have slotted in at No. 18. (My thanks to past Nieman Lab contributor Josh Macht — previously group publisher of the Harvard Business Review Group, now MassLive’s president — for gently nudging me about the omission.) Traffic dropped a hair in July, so MassLive only ranks at No. 20 this month. (Pathetic, right?)

With that, here’s the latest rankings of local newspapers’ websites, based on July 2025 data from Similarweb. A few items of note:

• With MassLive restored to its rightful place, Advance Local now accounts for 8 of the top 25 papers, including an astounding 7 of the top 9. Only the Los Angeles Times (No. 1), The Seattle Times (No. 5) and the Miami Herald (No. 10) joined them in the top 10.
• Big traffic gainers in July: McClatchy’s Miami Herald (up 66% over June) and Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle (up 32%) and Houston Chronicle (up 43%).
• The Chronicle’s growth coincided with the summer’s massive Texas floods, which led to traffic spikes at a number of Texas papers. Visits at the San Antonio Express-News — also a Hearst paper — were up 50% from June to July, moving it from No. 66 to No. 44 in the rankings. The Statesman in Austin saw a 31% bump.