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| 'As agencies we need to care whether the circulation figures we get are really paid circulation. My feeling is that if an individual hasn't knowingly laid out any money for a paper, it shouldn't be listed as paid circulation.' |
ABC considers paid circulation
Major papers irked over Gannett give-aways
By Dave Lindorff
Want a tip on how to cut your your kid's college tuition bill?
Try this for fun.
Tell your daughter or son to go to the bursar's office and demand a refund for all the free papers they dumped unasked at her dorm all semester.
She should be refunded the cost of the papers, or at least the subscription price.
Why? Because even though the college only paid a pittance--if anything--the Audit Bureau of Circulation counts those papers as paid circulation, not freebies.
And that's not all.
ABC has increasingly been counting things like complementary hotel or sports event distribution as paid circulation.
This is not sitting well with a number of newspapers that belong to the organization, nor does it please media buyers.
Some major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times, are charging that the 86-year-old nonprofit auditing outfit is being manipulated by member newspapers that give away a high proportion of their press run.
The main target of complaints is Gannett, with its 73 regional papers and USA Today, which is widely distributed on campuses, on airplanes, in hotel rooms and elsewhere.
Gannett's competitors are doing more than complaining. They're contracting with PriceWaterhouseCoopers to give them separate audit reports of their circulation, independent of the reports sent to the ABC.
"No one is disputing the accuracy of the counts or of ABC's audits," says a spokesman at the Wall Street Journal.
"It's just that the lines keep shifting at ABC about what's being counted as paid circulation, and how what's being counted gets presented.
"The rules have gotten more and more complicated, and made intentionally more subject to manipulation by those papers that have a high percentage of free or highly discounted issues."
Media people and advertisers, who are also represented on the board of ABC, are also expressing concern about the bureau's changing counting methods.
"As agencies, we need to care whether the circulation figures we get are really paid circulation," says Valerie Vogel, print manager at Western Initiative Media in New York.
"My feeling is that if an individual hasn't knowingly laid out any money for a paper, it shouldn't be listed as paid circulation."
Alan Banks, executive media director for North America at Saatchi & Saatchi, concurs.
"I think ABC has done a great job over the years of trying to meet everyone's needs, but I do sometimes wonder if they aren't trying to please too many people and are ending up getting caught in the position of not pleasing anyone."
Banks says he hopes that having some major papers like the L.A. Times and The Wall Street Journal turn to an outside auditor will lead to a new measurement tool.
"Competition is great and would be good for ABC, too," he says.
"I would hope PriceWaterhouseCoopers starts a new measurement tool--one that opens up that whole area of learning not just how many papers are being sold, but who's reading them and what are they reading."
The only problem with the challenge to ABC being mounted by the California papers and the Journal is that it leaves newspaper media buyers with a mix of different and hard-to-compare circulation figures to work with.
Newspapers have been striving in recent years to become more user-friendly to advertisers by developing services that offer one-stop service for multi-region buys, and by standardizing column widths.
The fear now among some newspaper publishers is that if ABC's figures are challenged by another set of figures, frustrated media buyers could just throw up their hands and go elsewhere with their buying plans.
Efforts to obtain a comment from USA Today were unsuccessful.
Scott Harding, CEO of Newspaper Services of America, a Chicago-based print planning and buying agency and chairman of the board of ABC, acknowledges the criticism being leveled at the audit bureau, but says, "If any member has issues with the existing rules, this board has an open forum to address them and we look forward to revisiting any such rule."
He disputes charges of manipulation by any one group of publishers saying, "This is a tripartite board of 34 members. I've not seen any evidence of any board member inordinately pushing an agenda, and even if someone did, the board is too large to permit any one group to do it.
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Dave Lindorff is a staff writer for Media Life.
