Last month, I fact-checked one of newspapering's biggest boasts: "Sure, our print circulation may be down, but thanks to the web, more people read us than ever!"

That's true — depending on how you draw the circle.

My March story used data from Scarborough Research, which showed the Star Tribune's local "penetration" (the share of metro adults reading the paper or its website) down consistently beginning in 2006, to 51 percent in 2009. New data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations' just-released "Fas-Fax" report — which covers print and web circulation for the six months ending March 2009 — confirms the trend.

Before I get to the troubling numbers, I want to present an encouraging one:

According to ABC, startribune.com's total "unique visitor" count rose from 5.6 million in March 2008 to 6 million in the most recent report. That's roughly 9 percent web growth in a year — pretty good. (No data was listed for the Pioneer Press.)

But the news is less balmy the closer you get to 425 Portland.

Within the Twin Cities "designated market area" — with about 3.4 million adults — startribune.com readership in a given 30-day period fell from 613,969 to 595,674. That's a 3 percent drop ... on the web side, not the print side.

ABC also lets newspapers draw their own market area. Here, the Strib picked a slightly smaller metro with 2.4 million adults. Within this territory, the Strib's online readership actually grew 0.3 percent, from 518,837 to 520,432.

One wonders how the print-only experiment, tentatively begun a couple of months ago, will affect the next set of numbers.

Speaking of print: People sometimes assume because the web is free and print is not, online readership must be orders of magnitude bigger than than for the newspaper. Locally, it's the reverse.

Compare those 595,674 DMA adults who read startribune.com in the past 30 days to the 1.58 million who read the print version in the past seven days.

(Even that's down from 1.79 million in 2008. Using the Strib's preferred local market, print reach fell from 1.46 million to 1.32 million.)

I want to be clear: even though print remains the king revenue-wise, not all print circulation makes sense. Unprofitable routes and stat-padding "third-party" distributions are being bled out of the system, for sound business reasons.

Yet while the Strib remains by any definition a mass medium, it's scary to think its local web growth has stalled or reversed.

Strip away the metro stuff, and it's clear the surge occurred at the national, online level. As I've written before, that's not nothing for the ol' cash flow.

Still, generally speaking (don't know for sure in the Strib's case), national brings the lowest revenue stream per reader — pennies compared to dimes. Perhaps lots of those readers can add up.

But given where the money is, even as dominant as startribune.com is in the Twin Cities mediaverse, its local online growth rate (or non-growth rate) necessitates some radical new approaches.

And no Nancy, we're not talking NewsBreak.

Yes, startribune.com has one of the highest "time spent per user" figures of any newspaper site: 33 minutes a month, according to Nielsen Online, a figure that's remained relatively stable for several reporting periods. There's no breakout of local versus national, but that's just 64 seconds a day!

Even if you believe local is the key to survival, there are those who say newspapers should accept the trends and focus on niche-hood, pricing their ad-depleted products accordingly. Alan Mutter's "Reflections of a Newsosaur" makes that case today. His headline? "Diving circulation? Raise newspaper prices."