New FAS-FAX takes online temperature

By: Jennifer Saba This month, when the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases the FAS-FAX for the latest six-month period, it will look a little different. This go-around, and in the future, the organization is including online readership, total unique users, and combined print/ online reach (or "total audience" data).

At first glance, the change might seem negligible; the data takes over the columns where old readership stats were found. But to the industry, it's a long-overdue alteration, one that could move the public's ? and market's ? perception that newspapers are lame relics of the past and are instead growing, important news outlets for readers and advertisers.

As E&P went to press, ABC was nearing its early-November release of the latest FAS-FAX. The organization anticipates that about 200 daily papers out of 820 are supplying total-audience data, since it's a voluntary move. But ABC is pleased with the amount of papers planning to submit audience numbers. "Frankly, some people thought it would be lower than this," says ABC spokesman Neal Lulofs.

Most of the top 100 papers planned to submit audience numbers, though some larger ones opted out. Lulofs would not say which.

About one-third of the papers in the top 100 that are reporting online numbers are using Nielsen Online or comScore. ABC's preferred measurement service for the unique user data is Nielsen Online (which is owned by E&P's parent company). The organization plans to accept and audit internal logs too since Nielsen and comScore, both panel-based measurement services, don't cover a vast majority of newspaper markets.

The usual comparability issues will come into play, since there are wild swings between panel-based and internal online measurements ? with pluses and minus for each method. ABC believes Nielsen and comScore may undercount Web usage at work, a place where many people access newspaper Web sites. The survey panels are sometimes too small to extrapolate data for certain markets. For internal Web counting, server-based logs can overcount people who delete their cookies, therefore crediting them several times. Spiders and bots can seep into the data if they are not filtered out correctly.

For both print and online readership stats, ABC is working closely with Scarborough, though the Audit Bureau will work with other firms as well. Much of Scarborough's newspaper audience rating ? weekly print audience, weekly Web site audience, and integrated audience for the top designated markets ? will show up on the report (again, only if the paper allows ABC to publish that data).

ABC will notate the source: from Belden or Urban & Associates to Gallup and comScore, for example. The sourcing will appear on the publisher's statement as footnotes, but not in the FAS-FAX stats.

It may be fraught, but it's a positive start. The difference among measurement firms shouldn't cloud the big picture. "I think the general sense was that this was an idea whose time has come," says Stephen Hills, chairman of ABC's newspaper audience leadership committee and president and general manager of The Washington Post. "People feel that the total audience story hasn't gotten out, to the degree it should."

As for differences in metrics, Hills says that it's something to be addressed over time and that all online sites, not just newspapers, suffer from the same issue. He points out that while his paper is using Nielsen, they know they are probably being undercounted since the company doesn't measure usage by .gov or .mil IP addresses.

"If we waited for the perfect measurement," to introduce audience FAS-FAX, Hills says, "we would be getting this out 10 years from now. The perfect is the enemy of good."