Circulation Steroids?
McWow -- has it been 25 years already?
USA Today celebrates its silver anniversary tomorrow and the toasts are pouring in. What was mocked as "McPaper" back in the day is now basking in a flood of "ahead of its time" compliments and "they're number one"s.
Marketwatch's Jon Friedman offered up this view:
It was the summer of 1983. I had just landed my first newspaper job, at a daily with the unlikely name of USA Today. While the publication was not yet a year old, it had already achieved notoriety -- as a journalistic joke.And Editor and Publisher chimed in as well:You see, I lived in Manhattan, where the New York Times is the dominant voice. Times loyalists, as well as newspaper purists and big-city pundits, got a kick out of ridiculing my new employer…
Figured. The city slickers didn't understand the strategy -- or the appeal -- of USA Today. Well, they get it now. USA Today now has an average daily circulation of 2.3 million.
Since it launched on Sept. 15, 1982, amid complaints that it lacked in-depth reporting and used too many snappy graphics and color photos in place of hard-hitting news, the national daily has taken position as a circulation leader, ranking at or near the top consistently.But one sorta squishy fact pops up in all the reporting surrounding the so-called "Nation's Newspaper": That it's on top of the heap in terms of circulation – soundly beating the Wall Street Journal by 200,000 readers and doubling the circulation of the New York Times.In addition, the paper has transformed the way many dailies operate, from pushing shorter, quicker brief-style stories to leading the way in color photography long before others saw the need.
But it's worth noting that a big part of USA Today's circulation success story underscores the newspaper industry's slippery measuring system. See, USA Today doesn't get bought by 2.3 million people, at least not in the traditional sense of the word "bought." Instead, they carpet the hallways of America's hotels, making "The Nation's Newspaper" more like The Nation's Doormat.
So while the USA Today story is overwhelmingly positive, it's also a case study in fuzzy math. Here are the top five papers in America by circulation, according the newspaper industry's Audit Bureau of Circulation(ABC):
But according to data acquired by this writer from the ABC, 1,174,632 USA Todays are provided to the lodgers of America during the week, compared to 84,918 Wall Street Journals and a relatively modest 43, 209 New York Times. Yes, USA Today works out financial agreements with the hotels, and there's nothing untoward about the practice … but it still casts the numbers in a different light. (And yes, observant readers, that also means that USA Today has a higher hotel circulation than the overall number for the New York Times.)
In other words, USA Today is sort of the Barry Bonds of the newspaper world – an astounding accomplishment in its field that ascended even higher due to some crafty and savvy maneuvering. (And yes, I realize that this analogy casts the WSJ as Hank Aaron and the Gray Lady as Babe Ruth, but work with me.) No, there's nothing against the rules about what the paper is doing -- the hotels and inns of America aren't quite the "cream" and the "clear" -- there is a bit more to the USA Today success story than at first glance.