At the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel, those types of daily sales jumped 53% in two years, to nearly 38,000 copies a day. But advertisers were unenthusiastic, so the newspaper pulled back. Take hotel copies, Mr. Smith says: 'Are the people staying in those hotels actually going to shop with those advertisers?' The answer in many cases, he says, is no. In February, the Sentinel sent a letter to advertisers saying it was cutting many of the nearly 20,000 papers a day it sent to hotels.That's quite a sizable figure when you consider that their circulation is stated as 248,492. Not surprisingly, padding their circulation figures with give-aways, even allowable by ABC rules, wasn't included in the the list of "major steps you have taken in the last four years to increase readership" given to the Readership Institute. Still, the give-away figure for hotels alone explains why the Orlando Sentinel, unlike the St. Petersburg Times, experienced no drop in circulation in the wake of the 2004 hurricanes.
Those were just the questionable, but legal, methods of inflating circulation. Then there were the deliberate frauds. Newspapers didn't volunteer information about their circulation frauds until advertisers started fighting back, demanding accountablity for their advertising buck. Would newspapers have admitted the circulation frauds it if they were not faced with a backlash, an alternative by advertisers, or a possibility of an alternative on the internet? Probably not. It also helped that a few brave advertisers decided to sue newspapers. For their efforts, Newsday decided they wouldn't carry the advertisers who were suing them, a decision they have since changed. But, primarily, I think it is because the Justice Department would back criminal investigations which explains this ad:
The Orlando Sentinel Endorsed John Kerry, First Endorsement of a Democrat in 40 Years. "Our choice was not dictated by partisanship. ... Indeed, it has been 40 years since the Sentinel endorsed a Democrat - Lyndon Johnson - for president." [Orlando Sentinel editorial, 10/24/04]The theme was enlarged at the California Democrat Party site.
John Kerry Has Been Endorsed by 169 Publications with 19.6 Million Total Circulation. John Kerry has received the endorsements of 169 publications, including 150 daily newspapers, with a total circulation of more than 19.6 million. Of these, 40 publications, with a total circulation of more than 3.4 million, endorsed George W. Bush in 2000. [Bacon's MediaSource]
Those endorsement figures are more revealing than newspapers know. They speak of declining influence when 40 newspapers with a circulation of 3.4 million have more influence with voters than the leftwing, pro-Democrat, MSM.
No accounting fraud for circulation figures, no liberalization of ABC methods, will change the decline in newspaper circulation. Not when newspapers can't even command respect from their reporters who continue to flaunt ethical standards in imitation of the lack of ethical standards in the editorial boardrooms. Reporters know their papers better than the readers and Jason Blair's contempt for the New York Times and Jack Kelley's contempt for USA Today even while his wife is an Executive VP at the paper, tells more about the decline of newspapers than any loss of circulation.
Howard Kurtz, typical of the media who cover the media, literally cover for it. In "Ethics Pressure Squeezes a Few Out the Door" he takes the position that it used to be worse. We just never knew about it. Maybe. But then when someone of Kurtz's stature willingly glosses over Barbara Stewart as a "Boston Globe freelancer" without stating that she was a ten year veteran of the New York Times who is credited by herself with writing seventy profiles of the victims of 9/11, you know that Kurtz isn't ignorant of the facts. He just wants you to be.
To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, "And that's the way we want it to be."
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