Inflated Circulation Totals

Tribune Co. found circulation errors in its two New York area newspapers, Newsday and Spanish-language Hoy. (Jennifer S. Altman -- Bloomberg News)

Single-copy sales have become even more important to some newspapers as subscription sales falter. The Newspaper Association of America says that single-copy sales, as a percentage of all sales, have risen from 15.7 percent to 21.9 percent over the past four years. But the increase in percentage largely comes from declining subscription sales and does not mean that the number of single-copy sales has risen. In other words, single-copy sales are a larger piece of the pie, but the pie is shrinking.

On Monday, the ABC said it will shine a brighter light on papers' reporting of single-copy sales. From now on, papers will be required to provide detailed records, for instance, of the location of all of their hawkers, how many papers they were given, how many they sold and how many they returned. ABC auditors will make unannounced visits to hawkers, said Michael J. Lavery, the organization's president.

Also, the group's censure will be automatically triggered if the ABC finds that a paper has inflated circulation by at least 5 percent for two consecutive audits.

Like a baseball umpire, Lavery said the ABC creates the "strike zone" for newspaper circulation -- determining which kinds of newspaper sales count toward circulation and which do not. In recent years, however, Lavery acknowledged that the organization has enlarged the strike zone. For instance, it now allows papers to count as paid circulation any copy that sells for at least 25 percent of the newsstand cost. Therefore, Dow Jones & Co. -- which charges for the online version of its Wall Street Journal -- can now count those readers toward the Journal's total circulation.

Newspapers also have been allowed to sell copies in other novel ways, persuading big-box retailers or other third parties to buy a number of papers at a reduced cost and then deliver them free to non-subscribers as a marketing gimmick. The copies distributed in this way count as paid circulation for the paper.

Sometimes, new initiatives to boost readership actually cut into circulation efforts. At The Washington Post, for example, daily circulation has fallen from 779,898 to 717,696 over the past five years; nearly three-quarters of the decline has been in single-copy sales. The paper chalks up some of that drop to the increased popularity of its Washingtonpost.com Web site and Express, the free daily it launched in August 2003, which will soon print 175,000 copies each day.

The ABC was founded in 1914 and is based outside of Chicago. It is funded by dues from its 4,300 members, and its executives come from the advertising and publishing industries. In addition to newspapers, the ABC audits the circulation of magazines and farm and business publications.

But the ABC acknowledges that there is little it can do against a newspaper determined to hide it true numbers. For instance, Lavery said, the Sun-Times blamed press malfunctions as the reason for excluding some days and doctored documents to verify the claim.

Even though the ABC demands press-run reports, it must trust that the paper is not lying about its operations, Lavery said. "We're not press experts," he said. "We wouldn't know a broken hinge if we saw it."

Still, the ABC was fooled by the Sun-Times' tricks for seven years. The Sun-Times said it began pumping up its circulation numbers in 1997, by an average of less than 1 percent per day. Gradually, it boosted the numbers further.

"Should we have found it? Yes," Lavery said. "But collusion is a very effective initiative to circumvent audits for a period of time."