The Providence Journal saw its web traffic soar 279% at the end of 2025

It’s an unfortunate truism that bad news in the real world is often good news for news publishers. Tragedy attracts eyeballs, and that’s even more true when the tragedy doesn’t have a clear ending. On December 13, a 48-year-old man opened fire on a group of Brown University students studying for finals, killing two and wounding nine others. A mass shooting on an Ivy League campus was always going to draw attention, but the scale multiplied when it became clear that the shooter had somehow gotten away. By the time the shooter was found dead by suicide five days later, he’d killed another man in Massachusetts.

The national attention pushed a lot of people to the website of The Providence Journal, Rhode Island’s major daily newspaper, which covered the story closely. And that extra traffic meant that it saw the largest jump in web traffic of any U.S. local newspaper in December 2025, according to data from Similarweb.

Since the summer, we’ve been publishing traffic data for the top 25 local newspapers in terms of traffic and identifying which ones see noteworthy swings. Scroll down and you’ll find the totals for Q4 of 2025 — October, November, and December. The ProJo’s December traffic increased a whopping 106% from November to December — pushing it from No. 48 in the country all the way up to No. 24, its first appearance in the top 25. But the paper was already on a roll before the shooting; its November jump in traffic was also one of the five highest in the country. (Compare: 1.894 million visits in September vs. 5.277 million in December.)

Top performers of Q4

In October, PennLive.com (The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa.) was the month’s biggest gainer in raw total traffic — not a big surprise from the always-strong-in-these-rankings Advance Local chain. It saw 4.2 million more visits in October than it had in September. In slightly smaller weight classes, both the Chicago Sun-Times (up 2.4 million visits) and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (up 1.6 million visits) were both big gainers. (And yes, it still seems strange that Chicago and Milwaukee are the welterweights to Harrisburg’s heavyweight — that’s the Advance Local magic at work.)

And the small papers that were the biggest percentage gainers in October included The Standard-Examiner of Ogden, Utah (up 104% over September), The Coastal Courier of Hinesville, Ga. (up 73%), The Skagit Valley Herald in Washington (up 50%), and the Wausau Daily Herald in Wisconsin (up 43%).

November was a slower month overall — traffic to the top 25 local newspaper sites dropped about 10% from October, and 62 of the top 100 saw some sort of decline. With larger sites having an off month, the biggest gainers in raw visits were The Columbus Dispatch (up 922,000 visits from October), The News Journal of Wilmington, Del. (up 826,000), The Indianapolis Star (up 726,000), The Courier-Journal in Louisville (up 715,000), and The Oklahoman (up 697,000). All five are Gannett newspapers. (Well, they started November as Gannett papers; they ended it as USA Today Co. papers.)

Smaller papers that had big Novembers: The Aurora Sentinel in Colorado (up 93%), The Stockton Record in California (up 62%), The Hammond Star of Louisiana (up 39%), and the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming (up 35%).

Finally, December saw a small bump in overall traffic, up about 5% from November among the top 25. In raw traffic terms, the ProJo won the month, but the L.A. Times (up 2.7 million visits from November), MassLive.com (up 2.3 million), the Detroit Free Press (up 2.3 million), and MLive.com (up 1.3 million) were not far behind. MassLive and MLive are Advance Local sites, of course.

Meanwhile, The Detroit Free Press had the most momentous December of them all when its joint-operating agreement with rival The Detroit News expired on December 28. Less than a month later, the Freep’s owner Gannett — er, USA Today Co. — announced it had acquired the News from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Execs insist that they’ll keep publishing the two newspapers separately, but I don’t think anyone expects that to last in the long term.

Smaller dailies with healthy December gains included The Jefferson City News Tribune in Missouri (up 49%), The Augusta Chronicle in Georgia (up 44%), The Akron Beacon-Journal (up 43%), and The Palm Beach Post (up 40%).