Velociman is wondering why newspapers are suddenly piling up on his front lawns, free copies of local rags he does not subscribe to or want to read.

The answer is undoubtedly an organization called the ABC, which stands for the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Think of them as the Neilsen of the print industry. If you want to sell advertising based on certain circulation figures, you need the ABC to come in and audit your numbers.

Back in the days when I was a financial auditor, I had a local newspaper as a client. And I was stuck in the same room with the ABC auditor, and we got to talking. This is pre-1996 for reference sake. When he wasn’t telling me stories of his fondness for nudist camps and the various 3-way sexcapades he would have at them, he told me stories of how he’d act like a private eye, following delivery trucks from the newspaper office to the local river, where he’d watch the driver dump the entire load of printed papers, and then claim they’d been delivered to newsstands and storefronts. He hadn’t seen anything like that at the paper I was auditing, but he had seen it at large, nationally recognized name papers.

Velociman extolls “There is no need to engage in assault marketing tactics.” Ahh, but that’s not what this is. It’s a fraud upon the advertisers, who are likely being told that Mr. Crawford requested all these free samples or is otherwise a subscriber. The point isn’t to get Kim interested in the papers, but rather to fool the advertisers into thinking that Kim is a legitimate reader. It’s advertising fraud, and it’s been going on for a loooong time. And the free press doesn’t report on it, because they’re all engaging in it.

The problem with the Internet for newsprint isn’t that it siphons off readers, but rather that it provides incontrovertible proof of how many people are actually reading the damned thing. And having based their pricing for so many years on fraudulent readership figures, they now find themselves unable to convert those advertisers over to the Internet at the same per-person rates. They shot themselves in the foot, and their fate is well deserved.

I’ve already written what I think newspapers need to do to save their skins. Again, I doubt any of them will. They’ll go down trying to steal from their advertisers and by littering our respective front lawns. Good riddance to them I say. Long live the Internet.

Tags: news

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