Mag Publishers Resist Rapid-Report Regime

The magazine business has long been weirdly secretive about circulation data, delaying the release of issue-by-issue numbers until weeks or months after the fact.

That was supposed to change this year with the widespread adoption of a new, rapid-reporting system by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry body most big publishers use to verify their claims. ABC Rapid Report allows publishers to post sales numbers for an issue as soon as it goes off-sale, defusing one of the main arguments used by TV and web outlets to lure advertising dollars away from print.

There's only one problem with the new system: Publishers aren't using it. Or not nearly as much as they could be, anyway.

As of yesterday, the January issues of most monthly magazines had been off newsstands for nearly a full month. Yet only a few major publishers -- including Alpha Media Group (publisher of Maxim and Blender), ESPN (ESPN The Magazine), American Media Inc. (the National Enquirer, Men's Fitness), and Johnson Publishing (Ebony) -- have reported numbers for the month. Time Inc., Hearst, Conde Nast (parent of Portfolio), Hachette Filipacchi, Meredith Corp., Rodale and Wenner Media all have yet to report their numbers -- even for their weekly and biweekly titles.

A spokeswoman for Conde Nast says the company's policy is to report 10 weeks after an issue goes off sale, "which is consistent with many other publishers." A Time Inc. spokeswoman says her company reports after five weeks off sale.

The five-week gap between the two, however, shows how arbitrary those two policies are. "Everybody knows how they did in January," within a few percentage points, says a publishing executive. "The data is available for everybody at the same time."

In that case, why delay at all? Perhaps because publishers have long used the lag in reporting as insurance against the caprice of the marketplace. ABC only requires publishers' circulation reports to be accurate on the basis of a six-month average, not on an issue-by-issue basis. Advertisers, however, care about the distribution of the specific issues in which they ran ads. Thus, a publisher who knows how many copies each issue sold in a six-month period can smooth out the spikes, subtracting copies from the high-selling ones and adding them to the low-selling ones to insure that each individual issue meets its rate base, or circulation guarantee.

But require publishers to report their numbers before they know how subsequent issues will sell and the whole scheme falls apart. That may be why at least one executive at an early-reporting company has received calls admonishing the company not to file so promptly.

A spokesman for ABC, Neal Lulofs, says there are currently no guidelines on how quickly magazines should provide their numbers to Rapid Report. "The challenge is that participation isn't mandatory, so it'd be tough for the board to mandate that," he says. Nevertheless, he expects the topic to come up for discussion at ABC's board meeting next month.