'NYT' Documents 'Uninvited' Circulation Surge

By: E&P Staff In a major article appearing Monday, The New York Times reports that each week in the United States at least 1.6 million people "who are not on newspaper subscriber rolls are being delivered copies that did not cost them a cent -- but they are still being classified as paying customers."

The papers, typically paid for by advertisers, are delivered by small dailies along with a group including The Miami Herald, The Wall Street Journal, The San Jose Mercury News, and The Boston Globe.

Citing one example, reporters Jacques Steinberg and Tom Torok reveal that on an average Sunday more than 100,000 copies of The Denver Post (more than one in eight printed) "are delivered to homes in Colorado that did not request or pay for them.

"The unsolicited deliveries were made possible by rule changes the newspaper industry approved three years ago. The new rules allowed so-called third-party sales -- which the industry once shunned -- to be counted as part of a newspaper's total circulation. Without them, many newspapers would be losing circulation at a far higher rate."

The Times said it analyzed circulation data that 669 newspapers provided to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, relying on Sundays except in the case of USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, which do not publish on weekends.

The analysis found that the combined average paid circulation for all those papers for the six-month period that ended March 2004 fell (under ABC rules) by only 0.2 percent. But had third-party sales been excluded from those figures, the average paid circulation of those papers would have fallen nearly 2 percent.

E&P has been reporting on this phenomenon since last summer, along with the fact that some advertisers have been critical of the industry's increasing reliance on papers paid for by others, along with other cut-rate plans.

"When we know there is someone reaching in their pocket and paying for a newspaper, we feel there is a greater likelihood they're going to read that newspaper and thus be exposed to our advertising," Matthew Spahn, director for media planning at Sears, told the Times. "When they haven't reached in their pocket, the concern is, 'Are they going to read it?'"

William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive of MediaNews Group, and publisher of the Denver Post, told the Times, "Once this became the rule, we took the position, 'Hey, it's the rule and we're going to use it.'"

And use it they did. According to the Times, "the Sunday circulation of The Post would have fallen about 12 percent, or more than 90,500 copies, from 2002 to 2004, had the publisher not been able to include free papers delivered to homes. When those copies were included, the paper's circulation fell by fewer than 12,000 copies, or less than 2 percent, to 783,274."

The Times also reported that among the biggest gains in third-party paid circulation were at The Boston Globe, which is owned by The New York Times Company.

And the Times itself? The article said sponsored copies represented less than 1 percent of paid circulation on Sundays earlier last year. But during the week, "copies distributed to elementary and secondary schools, many of them paid by the institutions or by foundations and allowed under the old rules, represented 4.6 percent of the paper's circulation."