YEAR by year the so-called popular papers are becoming less and less popular. Combined sales of The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Express and Daily Star fell on average last year by 300,000 a day, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Over the past decade, moreover, their sales have fallen by two million. But let’s hold on to the good as well as the depressing news about the future of newspapers.

In the era of 24-hour online news, 24-hour TV and radio news, blogs, podcasts and news to mobiles or e-mails, it is surely remarkable that national newspapers, news delivered on dead trees, still sell more than 12 million copies a day, with at least another two million sold by regional dailies. It’s going to be several years yet before newspapers disappear and before most stop making a decent profit.

It’s good news, too, that all the upmarket papers, with the exception last month of The Sunday Telegraph, are bucking the trend. Only four of the 20 national daily and Sunday papers increased sales year on year during the six months of July to December 2005. Three were broadsheets-turned-compacts — The Times, Guardian and Independent on Sunday — and the other was the unstoppable Sunday Times, the Chelsea FC of Sunday papers.

The falls in sales of the others were infinitesimal. Indeed The Observer, revamped into The Guardian’s Berliner format, has sold more than 500,000 in the past two weeks, with month-on-month increases of more than 50,000.

There are two obvious conclusions: readers enjoy the compact format and the newspapers that treat them as grown-ups.

Some editors and marketers might also note a pertinent comment by Martin Kettle in last Saturday’s Guardian: “The media are preoccupied by the fact that young people are less interested in newspapers and news programmes. So the media are permanently reconceiving and rebranding themselves to appeal to people who do not want to read or watch them rather than to people who do.” Hear, hear to that.

The really good news from newspapers, however, is the explosion of interest in news delivered online instead of on dead trees and it is still not being widely recognised.

Sales of The Sun have fallen by more than 750,000 in the past decade. But the online Sun, where the paper’s future lies, had a staggering 131 million page impressions in November and 5.4 million unique users.

There were 6.9 million unique users of Times Online in November. Guardian Unlimited had 106 million page impressions and 11.7 million unique users in December, up 19 per cent year on year.

These are mind-boggling but exhilarating figures, which show that British newspapers today are reaching global audiences that would have been unimaginable only 20 years ago. Newspapers printed on dead trees undoubtedly are on their way out, but online newspapers are on the way in — and in exactly the same way that online shopping has suddenly taken off.

All of which puts the bad news into perspective. It is depressing news, nevertheless. Sales of all the popular papers were down year-on-year over the last six months of 2005. The table, right, omits Richard Desmond’s Express and Star titles, which appear to have the worst sales records. That is because Desmond is playing the good guy in the presentation of his titles’ sales figures and omitting “bulks” — the papers given away on aircraft and trains to inflate circulations.

With a sale of 800,000 last month, the Daily Express was down 98,000, or 11 per cent, on 2004. Yet in 2004 it declared 60,000 bulk sales and the Mail declared about 100,000 in both years. Express sales at the full cover price, which editors and circulation managers consider a truer test of a paper’s appeal, were down only 45,000 on 2004, with the Mail up by 20,000.

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