Circ scandals point to endemic problems

The St. Petersburg Times has an excellent overview of the circulation scandals. Salient points for us (emphasis mine):

"This has kind of rattled my confidence," said Conrad Szymanski, president of Beall's Department Stores, a major advertiser in Florida papers. "When circulation numbers have an audit stamp, that gave me a lot of confidence. If I'm getting something less, I'm paying too much."

Hmm. Nice if Mr... oh, heck-- Conrad didn't have to worry about circulation, eh?

There were several common threads among the three circulation scandals. All involved public corporations, all involved large-market newspapers with a high number of single-copy sales (as compared to home subscribers), and all relied heavily on independent distributors.

And with the exception of Hoy, which boasted that it had tripled circulation in four years, the other papers reported very modest increases. In some cases, these papers even showed slight circulation decreases, despite adding phantom sales.

By lying, these publications were mitigating the circulation declines faced by nearly every newspaper in the nation.

"Newspaper readers are dying off," said John Morton, an industry expert in Silver Spring, Md. "Circulation has been in decline for more than a dozen years. And it probably will continue to decline unless some of these attempts to attract young readers prove more successful than likely."