By: Lucia Moses Since the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) liberalized its definition of paid circulation, newspapers have found no end to ways of using third-party sales to nudge their net paid numbers by a percentage point or two.
But even skeptics who worried that selling deeply discounted copies to third parties would cheapen the value of paid circulation probably couldn't have imagined a daily paper more than doubling its circulation that way.
Still, that's just what
The Hour in Norwalk, Conn., did. Eight months ago, it launched a weekly to target neighboring Stamford. Calling it an "edition" of its Sunday paper,
The Hour sold 17,766 copies of
The Stamford Times to auto dealers, grocers, and the like, and mailed free copies (paid for by the advertisers) to Stamford households. Counting all of this as paid circulation,
The Hour ballooned its Sunday circ to 31,453 in the six months ended March 31 from 14,251 a year earlier.
"The plan is working," Chet Valiante, publisher of
The Hour, said cheerily. "We have no plans to discontinue it."
The Stamford Advocate (circulation 27,000 weekdays and 31,644 Sunday), which scoffed at the weekly plan back in September, isn't laughing now. Craig Allen, vice president of operations, accused
The Hour of violating the spirit of the ABC rules, if not the letter, and has complained to ABC.
"Their outlandish circulation claim is at our expense," Allen said. "I've been in the business a long time. I've never seen anything like it."
Allen charged the weekly doesn't resemble
The Hour as editions should, but Valiante said ABC approved it. And Valiante said any copies delivered to homes are paid for by advertisers, in accordance with third-party-sales rules. Roughly 4,000 copies not subsidized by advertisers are distributed free via news racks, but those aren't counted as paid, he added.
Allen noted that the weekly has a $1 cover price, yet subscribers pay just 10 cents a copy. Valiante's answer: Papers are allowed to have different basic prices for single-copy and home-delivery sales, though he acknowledged, "This is a bigger-than-normal difference."
An ABC spokeswoman wouldn't discuss Norwalk, citing a policy against getting into member complaints, but she said ABC is addressing a member paper's concerns there.
The squabble is only the latest episode in a bitter circulation battle over Connecticut's Gold Coast.
The Hour, owned by a trust, and the
Advocate, owned by the Tribune Co., both have launched competing products and slashed prices in recent years.
Valiante insisted
The Hour got ABC's OK for its weekly "every step of the way." With the papers' competitive history in mind, Valiante seems to take the scrutiny in stride. "It's a kind of unusual situation," he said. Were the shoe on the other foot, he said, "Maybe I'd want to do the same thing."
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