The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said Friday that its combined print and online audience was 2.2 million adults for the prior week, a 7 percent increase from a year ago.

The company also shared numbers produced by the Scarborough Research firm that showed the number of consumers who say they read the paper increased 6.5 percent Monday-Saturday and 4.5 percent on Sunday as of March 30, compared with a year earlier.

"We're much better at targeting [readers], we're much better at retention, our services have improved," said Bob Eickhoff, senior vice president, operations. "Getting it in the hands of readers that are the most important to advertisers and will read our product is the end game, and we've gotten much better at that."

The announcement came ahead of national print subscriber figures scheduled to be released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, a circulation-auditing agency that issues a report every six months. Nearly all national and regional newspapers have seen circulation fall in recent years but point optimistically to the growth of Internet and nontraditional businesses.

The AJC's Monday-Saturday circulation fell 8.8 percent compared with a year earlier, to 327,392, the company said. The AJC's Sunday circulation was down 5.1 percent, to 497,149 , in the same period.

The drop was expected, Eickhoff said. It is a result of the AJC's decision to reduce the number of counties it serves to 74 from 179 starting April 1 of last year, he said.

Excluding the effects of the cutback, the AJC's Monday-Saturday circulation for the 74 counties dropped 5.2 percent, Eickhoff said. Sunday circulation fell 1.7 percent , he said.

AJC officials said they are pleased with gains in Internet readers and total readership.

Company officials said in interviews that the AJC's online readership continues to grow and that other yardsticks besides the number of print subscribers are needed to gauge the health of modern news organizations that deliver information via print, Web sites, cellphones and other channels.

For example, the number of users who go to ajc.com at least once a week was 815,000 as of March 30, according to the Scarborough Newspaper Audience Ratings Report. That represents an 18 percent market penetration in the 53 counties surrounding Atlanta, up from 17 percent a year earlier.

The AJC's Web site's 18 percent market share is tied for third with the Web sites of the Cincinnati Enquirer and the San Diego Union-Tribune, according to the Scarborough report. The leader is washingtonpost.com at 22 percent.

The Web sites of the AJC and The Seattle Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer led 35 markets with 6 percent of "unduplicated" audience — those who read online but do not buy a newspaper, the report said.

"Those are good numbers," said Hyde Post, the AJC's vice president for Internet. "I think you earn loyalty and earn support by packaging content in an engaging manner and by having unique content."