ABC Votes to Make Sweeping Changes to Newspaper Circulation

By: Jennifer Saba The board of the Audit Bureau of Circulations voted on a set of wide-sweeping changes that will put more prominence on the metric of total audience and affect the way newspaper circulation is counted.

During an annual meeting last week in Chicago, the board agreed to several recommendations by a committee -- consisting of both publishers and advertising executives, ABC stressed -- that will entail the following changes:

*Implement a flexible pricing model where newspapers will be considered paid by ABC regardless of the price for which the copy was sold.

*Other-paid circulation will become "verified circulation" similar to how ABC accounts for magazines, meaning there will no longer have to be payment for third-party copies or Newspapers in Education for the circulation to count.

*Hotel and employee copies, currently under other-paid, will be reclassified under a new paid-circulation category.

*Newspapers will have flexibility to convert home subscribers to a greater frequency.

"Our aid was to streamline the audit process, clearly define important measurement standards, and improve overall communication between newspaper buyers and sellers," Craig Sinclair, vice president of advertising at Walgreen Co., said in a statement.

ABC has been working on these new strategies since the summer of 2006. The specifics will take approximately three years to work out, according to ABC, but it will alter the face of the FAS-FAX, publisher's statements, and audit reports.

The revised publisher's statements and audit reports will provide a summary of the total average paid and verified circulation and the distribution by channel, such as newsstand and total home-delivery copies.

The move comes a week after the release of another brutal FAS-FAX -- daily newspaper circulation fell about 2.5% and Sunday dropped about 3.5% for most of the papers reporting into ABC for the six-months ending September 2007.

Last week also marked the first-time appearance of audience FAX, which accounts for print readership, online readership, unduplicated combined readership, and monthly unique users. About 200 papers -- many of the major metros -- participated in the voluntary measurement.

The audience FAX is the first leg in the strategy to push the concept of total audience, where newspapers get credit for all their products, not just paid print circulation.

Part of board's changes were based on research from the Newspaper Association of America that showed that as long as person paid something for a newspaper they were just as likely to read it as someone who paid the full subscription price.

In the survey, the NAA found that as long as a person was consistently receiving a newspaper, even at the deeply discounted price, they were 95% as likely to read the paper as someone with a full paid subscription.

Additionally, the board elected three new directors: Kirk Davis, president and publisher of GateHouse Media New England; Lannie Dawson, executive vice president and director of media services at Martin-Williams Advertising; and Rob Fisher, vice president and group publisher of American City Journals.