Adam Reilly notes that the Metro has ended its short and inglorious reign as the second-largest daily in Boston. It did so in style, shedding a whopping 51,000 papers a day from its circulation. That’s a hell of a drop, even for a borderline-illiterate rag that’s better suited for wrapping fish or lining bird cages than reading. So what gives?
Dan Kennedy hazards three guesses: That the paper cut circulation voluntarily, that the loss accounts for capacity they were never using anyway, or that the newer, even dumber kid on the block is totally eating their lunch.
Of those three, I’m inclined to line up behind the second. When I spoke with now-deposed BostonNOW editor John Wilpers last spring, prior to the paper’s launch, he strongly suggested that the Metro was grossly inflating its circulation numbers. A walk through downtown in the afternoon, when street corners are often littered with surplus copies of the Metro, would seem to provide anecdotal evidence for this contention. The paper floods its distribution area, and whatever stacks of extras remain in the afternoon serve the cause of Media Audit name recognition ubiquity, and are written off as the cost of doing business.
The problem is, newsprint is wicked expensive, and sooner or later, whatever benefits you get by pumping up your circ numbers are outweighed by the cost of printing all those extra newspapers. If I had to guess, I’d say this fact is at least as responsible for the Metro‘s sudden fall as competition from BostonNOW is.
All of which is not to hold BostonNOW blameless in the circ numbers game, either. On most days, they still deliver papers to the Chinese place down the street from my house. Even though it burned down six or seven months ago.