By late 2010, newspaper audiences, like Caesar's Gaul, will be divided into three parts -- paid, verified and online. Is this an exercise in making the industry's tumbling circulation figures appear better? Not exactly, according to Mike Lavery, president and managing director of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC).
I chatted with Lavery by phone in search of the big picture on
a package of rules changes, stated in terms only an accountant could love, that were announced in November and made final earlier this month.
Will the net effect be numbers that make the industry's audience story a happier one? "That will vary newspaper by newspaper," Lavery said. The biggest change will be to allow all distribution for which consumers pay something to count as paid -- opening the door (which was not exactly closed in the first place) to deep discounting. Hotel distribution to travelers or copies businesses buy for their employees also count as paid but are separately labeled.
On the other hand some current components of "paid" -- distribution through the newspaper in education (NIE) program or copies paid for in special deals with a commercial sponsor or copies tothe paper's own employees -- all move to a new "verified" category. Thus, some but only some newspapers will report comparatively better "paid" numbers, Lavery said; more will show improvement if the standard measure becomes total print circulation (paid and verified).
ABC is jointly governed by publishers and advertisers/media buyers. The advertising side, Lavery said, is comfortable with "a more straightforward, intuitive definition of paid" and the breakout of other kinds of verified distribution by category. (The changes also phase out requirements to report an assortment of local, city and designated marketing area breakouts -- recognizing that targeted marketing now has evolved to the zip code level.)
I asked Lavery why, if these were sound ideas, it will take as long as two and a half years to put them in place. Partly that reflects the complexity of revising circulation accounting systems, he said, but it also allows newspapers ample time to plan a distribution and marketing strategy that fits the new rules. Ultimately there are also simplifications and savings for cost-conscious publishers.
Already ABC allows newspapers to serve customers who don't pay for a renewal or trial subscribers who never pay for up to 90 days and count them as paid. A new rule will allow new trial subscriptions of 12 weeks extending Sunday-only or weekend-only subscribers to seven days a week if they are notified and given a chance to opt out. But those will only count as paid if the customer ultimately pays to continue the service.
ABC also ramped up and repackaged its
online business last fall, partnering with Scarborough Research and the Newspaper Association of America on a new product (Audience-FAX) that seeks to measure combined print and digital audience. Lavery does not dispute the common criticism that online audience metrics like page views or unique visitors are neither precise nor particularly comparable to how print circulation and readership are measured.
"Down the road, engagement (defined as frequency and time spent reading a site's content) will be better measured," Lavery said. Ideally those metrics will have been refined and broadly accepted concurrently with the new print rules.
