Will Do-Not-Call Lead to Do-Not-Deliver?

By: Mark Fitzgerald With the federal do-not-call registry thwarting telemarketers -- and various do-not-spam proposals seeking to knock e-mail advertisers off-line -- could a do-not-deliver movement against unsolicited community newspapers and total market coverage (TMC) products be the next target of the public's "leave-me-alone" mood?

Worried newspapers hope not, because the free-distribution model is an increasingly efficient and popular marketing strategy. So far, at least, it appears that legislators and their constituents are not drawing a connection between telemarketer phone calls that interrupt dinner and a community newspaper thrown on the lawn once a week. "I haven't seen a grassroots movement" to limit unsolicited deliveries, said John Murray, vice president of circulation marketing for the Newspaper Association of America.

In the fast-growing far suburbs of Chicago, home delivery of a free paper is practically the only way to establish a market, said Sun Publications Publisher Jerry Alger. Do-not-call has not yet triggered a spike in do-not-deliver calls, Alger said: "We get far more calls to start than stop, because of new people moving in."

That's a pretty typical experience, other publishers said. San Antonio, Texas-based Prime Time Newspapers, for instance, had stop-delivery notices last week on only about a dozen of the 260,000 households that get its papers, said COO Bob Jones. Similarly, Houston Community Newspapers, a Westward Communications LP unit that delivers to 400,000 households weekly to its Texas markets, has not seen any jump in stops, said CFO J. Tom Graham: " I think the reason is, we make a real effort to have a real newspaper, a community product that's welcome at the door. I don't know what it would be like if we were just a shopper."

But the full community paper that Observer & Eccentric Newspapers delivers twice-weekly to some non-subscribers in suburban Detroit is not a shopper -- and Circulation Director LeeAnn Mitchell said do-not-deliver calls jumped sharply once the do-not-call (DNC) law went into effect. "It's been outrageous the number of calls we've been getting since DNC," she said.

"In the past, we would once in a while get a call, maybe one a week. Now it's 15 to 20 a week."