Great news! The Daily News, reports the Daily News, is still on top, circulation-wise, provided you squint and use a different system of metrics than the Audit Bureau of Circulations:
Distressing news for celebrity weeklies: Mediaweek has obtained the ABC numbers, and the category appears to be leveling off. Newsstand sales growth has slowed and more titles have entered the fray, causing "saturation."
• Times to sell ads on front business page. Coming next: white after Labor Day. [NYT]
• VF to boost biz coverage; AMI to miss accounting deadlines. [NYP]
• Us Weekly has its best-selling issue ever, and Janice Min had nothing to do with it. [Jossip]
• New Times Building turning out to be a good investment. Huh. So it turns out Pinch knows how to make those, every now and then. [NYP]
• The Committee to Protect Journalists picks a new executive director, and it turns out he's one of our machetunim, sort of. (I.e., new CPJer is real-life bro-in-law of our glittery little brother, Defamer.) [CPJ]
There's interesting ad in this week's Advertising Age. (Click on it to enlarge.) It might even be unprecedented, as some have suggested to us. It's from the Daily News, and it touts the tab's dominance over the Post. More New Yorkers read the Daily News, the ad brags. More buy it. It has more ads. Its online audience is growing. A cynic might point out that the accompanying charts aren't nearly to scale, but, even so — and nothwithstanding the atrocious grammar in Point 3 — the claims seem to be entirely true. Which would make, at first glance, this ad seem like endorsement of the News's great success over its rival.
Why is it, newspaper people always wonder, that the younger generation doesn't read our product? Why do kids find us irrelevant, they ask. And why don't the special youth-targeted things we publish help attract them, the bigshots wonder.
You know how every now and then the Post or the News or even the Journal or the Times is being given away for free somewhere in our fair city, usually in a sponsored-copies promotion? Well, today, apparently, nearly everything's free. Reports a correspondent:
• In latest stats, newspaper circ is — of course — down. One exception: The mighty NYT. Yay. Elsewhere in town, the Post-News gap narrows, as Rupe's tab loses fewer readers than Mort's. [E&P]
• Bauer to sell Life & Style and In Touch for only a quarter in two weeks. Hey, it worked for the Post. [Ad Age]
• The Forbes family seeks outside investors for European expansion. Being filthy rich apparently ain't what it used to be. [NYT]
• The Times new Weddings/Celebrations videos: Appalling, addictive slideshows. [Slate]
• Kaavya ain't the only plagiarizer out there. [NYM]
• Michael Jackson is mad at GQ, which made fun of him. [BBC]
• Valerie Plame is shopping a book proposal. As if we needed more proof that getting outed was the best thing to ever happen to her. [NYT]
• As RS turns 1,000, Jann Wenner is rich, neat, and happy. And has a sty in his eye. [WP]
• Shocker: Next audit report will show newspaper circ falling more. [E&P]
• Conde Nast is not trying to buy Rodale, nor vice-versa. [WWD]
• The Postal Service wants to increase rates on mags again, after a previous rate hike in January. Clearly, the Postal Service also wants no one in this business to ever have gainful employment again. [Folio:]
• Details missed its rate base on eight of 10 issues in 2005. Fun. [Ad Age]
• Martha Stewart launches Blueprint today in a bid to reach younger readers. There should probably be a joke about Alexis here, but we can't think of one. [NYP]
• Daily Candy remains for sale. [NYM]
• Punch Sulzberger has allegedly said that he'll read the Times on the computer when he can take a computer into the bathroom with him. Now, apparently, he can. [NYT]
• Kurt Andersen thinks we're in a tech bubble again. How does he know? Because Michael Wolff wants in. [NYM]
• Simon Dumenco answers the questions you didn't ask, including whether he has a clothing line and what his jingle sounds like. [Ad Age]
• Existentially speaking, who is Brian Williams? [MW]
• NYT M.E. Jill Abramson's grandfather could have invested early in Paramount Pictures but didn't. [NYSun]
• Page Six traffics in buzz, apparently. [NYT]
• Uncle Bob Schieffer might stick around to do end-of-show commentaries on Couric-led CBS Evening News. And also to show off his legs, of course. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Breaking: Daily News distributes sponsored copies! [NYT]
• It's hard to be a teen magazine. [Mediaweek]
• Real Simple loses two top editors; Details's Dan Peres tucks in. [WWD]
At right, a subscriber's polybagged copy of Bon Appetit. Which arrived Friday.
Or a New York Press deathwatch status report?
And now today there are reports of more free Wall Street Journals, this time sponsored by MaxJet, the biz-class-only service to London. Which, when we glanced at the calendar, finally made sense: It's March 31, the final day for one of the two annual Audit Bureau of Circulations reporting periods. As we've explained before, the Audit Bureau is the circ-counting police, and the bureau's rules allow free copies to count as paid circulation if someone, somewhere is paying for them. So when you MaxJet pays for a Journal to be handed to you, that's considered real, paid circ — and, as the reporting period draws to a close, newspapers all around town are driving up their daily-paid averages with this sketchy but fully legal gimmick.
• New York to anoint hot young editors; those photographed rumored to include TNR's Franklin Foer, The Atlantic's James Bennet, Roger Hodge of Harper's, and the Paris Review's Philip Gourevitch, who, at 44, calls the whole conceit into question. [Media Mob/NYO]
• The Times nominated Dargis for a Pulitzer, and no one there understands why; New York is pitching a Look Book book. [WWD]
• The Washington Post gets 88 New York Timeses every day, costing $18K annually. At least it's nice to know someone other than us isn't getting free papers. [WCP]
• Cargo was confused, and nobody will miss it. Um, yeah. [Slate]
• Bob Woodruff, the ABC anchor badly wounded in Iraq, last night received the Radio and Television Correspondents Association's David Bloom award, named for the NBC correspondent who died while covering the early days of the Iraq war. [B&C]
• Yesterday we passed along — rather skeptically, we'd point out — a random tip that Radar 3.0 would be "a weekly tabloid-style mag and is going to compete with Star, Us Weekly, In Touch, etc." Someone who'd be likely to know now assures us that the plan is to make the mag monthly. (But, then, hasn't that always been the plan?)
Ultimately we got reports yesterday of free Journals in all the places you'd expect — down the East Side, through midtown, and to Wall Street — and in one you wouldn't — at the Hoboken PATH station. Today, apparently, it's back to Post time: Murdoch's giving it away at, according to early reports, Penn Station, Union Square, and at Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn. (It's with Fresh Direct's sponsorship again, we're told.)
Two reports arrived early this morning:
