(NOTE: Since registration was required to get to the original I have revised this to make it a bit more complete)
First there were the reporting scandals at newspapers. Now this:
- (The Chicago-based) Tribune Co.'s Newsday newspaper (NOTE to readers: this company also owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles
Times and some other papers) admitted Thursday that it had substantially overstated its daily and Sunday circulation.
The paper's disclosure marked the second time this week that a Chicago-based newspaper company had confessed to large-scale exaggeration of the number of copies that its readers were buying.
Because the fees newspapers charge their advertisers are based on the number of readers the ads reach, overstating circulation cheats advertisers.
In fact, Newsday's advertisers had filed federal civil fraud charges against the paper in mid-February, alleging that the paper, based on New York's Long Island, had "secretly and fraudulently padded and inflated the circulation figures" on which ad rates were based.
The suit, which has sparked an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, asserted that Newsday's alleged "scheme" employed a variety of strategies designed to minimize the number of returned unsold copies.
And there's more:
- On Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune's crosstown rival, the Chicago Sun-Times, shocked advertisers by disclosing that an internal audit discovered the tabloid has for a number of years significantly overstated its circulation. The newspaper has so far provided few details.
In the wake of the Sun-Times' disclosure, shares of its parent, Hollinger International Inc., dropped nearly 10 percent.
"It's always serious when a newspaper is found to be inflating circulation," said independent newspaper consultant John Morton. "It's akin to theft."
We need a watchdog to watch society's watchdogs....
Which Tribune company are you talking about, Joe? The Chicago Tribune? I couldn't log into your link to find out.
(I insist on using one standard account name (my own) and one standard password in order to log into anything. On websites where this is not permitted, I simply avoid. I don't intend ever to put myself in position of having an online database of my own login names and passwords. Also, I do not like giving anybody any personal information about myself, except my name and my password. That way I avoid junkmail of all types.)
If you and Dean want to help folks like me avoid these problems, don't just link to these websites where we have to establish some kind of account in order to read stuff on them. Instead, paraphrase the article and report it properly. Like all good journalists were trained to do. Once upon a time.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Thanks, Joe. It's gratifying to see that at least someone in my life pays instant attention to my wants, pleas and demands. That's what it takes to keep an old man happy.
Now here's my response:
Back in the decades when I was an on-and-off Chicagoan, the great days of the Chicago Tribune occured when it was run the late, great, totally cantankerous Colonel Robert McCormick, who died in 1955.
Colonel McCormick (he got the military rank as a World War I officer in a real nasty combat zone in northern France) was one of the most uncompromising old-fashioned conservatives in the United States. He could act like a real bastard at time, but he sure as hell had integrity, which his contemporary and rival William Randolph Hearst frequently lacked.
The various administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- both for his New Deal socialism and his secretive efforts to push the United States into World War II without appropriate national preparedness -- were outright enemies of Colonel McCormick and the Chicago Tribune. McCormick went to so far as to get his hands on some of the US war plans just before World War II, and published them. (The liberals and pro-war folks went out and chanted for his scalp, which they didn't do 30 years later when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers stolen by Daniel Ellsberg.)
After the war, the Chicago Tribune fought surrender US sovereignty to the UNO. Domestically, it was the most partisan Republican-oriented newspaper in the country.
But what has Chicago had since his day? One bland afternoon newspaper (Chicago Sun-Times) and one bland morning newspaper (Chicago Tribune). The only main difference between them is that the stark 1950s architecture of the Sun-Times building along the Chicago river is better looking than the fake gothic monstrosity of the Tribune Tower a couple of blocks eastward.
After a while, people stop subscribing. And especially these days, they can get all their news from a thousand or more websites.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
An organization called the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) is supposed to do yearly audits on publications to ensure that their numbers are accurate. ABC is a partnership between the publishers and the advertisers.
Being a circulation employee of a publication, I've had to deal with ABC auditors in the past and a couple of things have struck me as weaknesses in the way ABC has been operating.
First, ABC has it's own give and take politics that cause the organization to approve some types of circulation and disapprove of others. An example of this is a category of sale called "Blue Chip Newsstand". Originally, Blue Chip Newsstand (BCN) circulation was defined as room to room sales at a hotel where the customer had the opportunity to refuse service and receive a discount on their room charges equal to the cost of the paper. As part of this circulation, it was customary for the newspaper to charge the hotel 70% or so of the cover price.
Recently, local papers, as a way of cutting into this category of sale, have offered papers to hotels for free as long as they still provide the customer with the opportunity to refuse the paper for the discount. This practice is similar to "dumping" product in a market which is considered an anti-trust violation in just about any other industry. This is a perfectly acceptable practice to ABC, however.
Second, perhaps it's my bad luck, but the few ABC auditors I've run into have been singularly uninspired individuals. They've been more interested in getting their hours in than being thorough and fair. Again, this may just be my bad luck, but with auditors like the people I've dealt with, I can see how papers falsify their circulation.
(/rant)
That's what they get for hiring former Democratic precinct captains to sell subscriptions. Them dead folks never complain when their paper doesn't arrive.