KEY POINTS:
Readership of the New Zealand Herald print edition is up strongly in the latest official survey.
The paper's average daily readership rose to 568,000, up 21,000 readers a day last year over 2005, in the Nielsen survey released at noon today.
Combined figures for the country's metropolitan papers show the Herald accounted for 21,000 of the 22,000 increase in average readership of city newspapers.
Readership was up every day, with biggest jumps on Monday and Thursday, the papers which include the new The Business and Timeout magazines introduced during the year.
In Auckland, the Herald increased readership by 18,000 a day to 386,000 -- higher than the number of viewers for either main TV news in the city.
The Weekend Herald remains the best read individual paper in the country, with 631,000 and the Wednesday edition of the Herald is second, with 601,000.
When combined with the daily readership of nzherald.co.nz, which gets up to 150,000 unique browsers a day, the demand for Herald content is higher than ever before.
The Herald on Sunday's readership remains Auckland's biggest in the Sunday market, at 203,000 and has a national total of 326,000.
In the rest of the market, the Otago Daily Times enjoyed an 11,000 rise to 111,000 readers, The Press in Christchurch suffered a 10,000 fall to 223,000 a day, Wellington's Dominion Post was stable at 253,000, the Sunday Star-Times fell again, down 19,000 readers to 577,000, Sunday News dropped 42,000 to 376,000 and the National Business Review slipped again, by more than 5 per cent to just 92,000.
