By: Jay Schiller Baseball fanatics a few years back created yet another statistic for judging pitchers, this one called WHIP, for Walks and Hits per Innings Pitched. A good WHIP is 1.0 or less. So I?ve created a new statistic for circulation, called DOP. It stands for Deeply Discounted and Other Percentage, and covers pitching newspapers.
To calculate DOP, you add a paper's average "Individually Paid at less than 50%" circulation to its "Other Paid" and divide that total by the "Total Paid" circ. The formula looks like this: (IP-50 + OP) / TPC = DOP. In my view, a DOP over 20% deserves an E at the end, and either meaning of the new word will do.
When it comes to circulation these days, performance-enhancing steroids are entirely legal. Unlike in pro sports, no asterisks or urine tests are needed.
According to the latest FAS-FAX numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the San Francisco Chronicle runs a DOP on Wednesdays thru Saturdays of 21.9% and on Sundays of 18.9 %. The San Jose Mercury News? DOP is 23.4% daily and 26.6% on Sundays.
Others running high DOPs include The Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald and the Orlando Sentinel in Florida and the Houston Chronicle and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas. The New Haven Register has a Monday-through-Friday DOP of 23.9%, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution a 19.8% Monday through Thursday, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review a daily DOP of 28.9%.
The undisputed King of the DOPs -- the Top DOP if you will -- is USA Today. That paper's Monday-through-Thursday DOP stands at 49.7%. And a surprising second to USA Today is The Wall Street Journal, at 36.1 %.
Maybe ?DOPs? will become the hot reality show. ABC auditors with calculators drawn will burst into newspaper offices looking to nail circulation directors for practically giving away some of their newspapers.
Proponents of a high DOP seem to be perpetuating the natural evolution of EZ Pay (newspapers debiting the checking accounts of subscribers) to NO Pay. I fear that, like dinosaurs and bell bottoms, fully paid circulation will one day become a thing of the past. Then circulation directors can truly concentrate on readership surveys.
Back in the not so old days, a decade or two ago, when I was an auditor for ABC, the DOPs (if we?d calculated them, perhaps with paper and pencil) normally ran around 1 to 3%. "Third Party Home Delivery" sponsored copies weren?t even a twinkle in the eyes of innovative circulation directors, and hotel programs were still in their infancy.
It took maybe five minutes to audit Newspapers in Education . Copies discounted more than 50% were chopped off the audit reports.
Today, many newspapers heroically try to keep ?Other Circulation? under 5 % of total distribution and a lot still try not to discount "Home Delivery" and "Single Copy" more than 50%. Here are a few papers that have low Sunday DOPs: the Chicago Tribune at 2.8 %, the Detroit Free Press at 1.7 %, and the Cincinnati Enquirer at 1.1 %.
But those soaring overall DOP figures tell another story.
Still, there?s one thing worse than running a high DOP. You could be a COFFIN: a Censured Out of FAS-FAX Indiscreet Newspaper.
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