Newspaper Audience - 2006 Annual Report

To add to the sense of alarm in some quarters, the losses of 2005 came on the heels of circulation scandals at several major publications in 2004. In particular, disclosures of padding of the numbers at Newsday, the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Sun Times and Hoy’s New York edition resulted in corrective measures. In Dallas, for instance, the Morning News took distribution inside the company to tighten controls. Part of what caused the scandal had been a system of aggressive quotas for independent distributors, and something of a don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude toward how they met those goals.7

It is worth noting that the 250,000 or so phantom readers who were purged from the totals at the four papers still do not show up in the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports and NAA estimates of industry circulation losses. That is because the papers remain on probation, and audited figures for year-to-year comparisons are not available. If those losses were added to the circulation losses of the last two years, they would add another half-percent.8

All of which raises the question, sometimes overstated in death-of-the-industry rhetoric, whether continued and quick decline in paid circulation is now inevitable.