Choice Hotels to Offer Wall Street Journal

In another bit of bad news for USA Today, which was once ubiquitous outside hotel-room doorways, Choice Hotels says it's chosen the Wall Street Journal as the "preferred newspaper" to offer at its 3,700 properties in North America. Choice's brands include Clarion, Cambria Suites, Comfort, Quality Inn, MainStay Suites, and Sleep Inn.

According to a statement from Dow Jones, the Journal will be delivered free to Choice Hotels guests starting New Year's Day. There was no mention of the financial arrangements or any barter deals Dow Jones might have made with Choice to get the newspapers into that pipeline, but Dow Jones has been expanding distribution of the Journal at domestic hotels over the last two years.

For decades, USA Today has been the standard free newspaper at hotels. But slippage became apparent in April 2009, when Marriott decided to stop distributing USA Today (almost always offered for free) at 2,600 Marriott-brand hotels in North America. This came after Marriott's chairman, Bill Marriott, decided that way too many of the brightly colored newspapers were being left untouched outside room doors, littering the corridors.

USA Today's parent company, Gannett, responded by claiming that only a small percentage of its circulation would be affected, like 1 percent. The media of course swallowed that.

By the way, I have nothing against Gannett's golden child USA Today, though I do still feel a slight residual pain from way back, when I was the editor in charge of investigative reporting at what was at the time a very aggressive Gannett newspaper. Aggressive, that is, until the then-fledgling USA Today began draining resources from all of the local Gannett newspapers, which were ordered to pay up and shut up.

I presciently resigned from that job after one glorious year (a few days, in fact, after Gannett had swopped down one night and fired the executive editor and the publisher, for spending too much money covering news).

OK, so a little professional residual resentment about USA Today, though I will concede that the paper aggressively covers travel-industry and travel consumer news, as well as sports. Anyway, I've always had some knowledge and a lot of interest in what I regard as the wild circulation claims that have always been made by USA Today. For one thing, I know no one who actually buys the paper, which claims to have a circulation of about 1.9 million on the five days a week on which it is published. I have always got it for free, usually from a hotel.

The gaudy founder of USA Today is a media buccaneer named Al Neuharth, who molded the Gannett company into a model of cost-efficiency, while at the same time ruining the journalistic reputations of more than a few regionally important local newspapers that had the misfortune of being acquired by Gannett. Neuharth is also the godfather of the much-hyped "Newseum" in Washington, which is positioned as a museum of journalism but which actually strikes me as a very pretty, essentially vacuous space near the Capitol, one noticable function of which seems to be serving as a venue for fancy cocktail parties tossed by media panjandra who rent the joint for regular celebrations of one another.

Neuharth, by the way, was also the cunning genius who got the whole newspaper industry to go along with his scheme to allow newspapers that are not sold at or near the cover price to be counted as paid circulation. As a result, even newspapers whose circulation claims are bolstered by a vast number of so-called bulk-sales copies that are essentially given away free (or as part of promotional barter deals with hotels and airlines) can make inflated claims about their circulation, which claims are always swallowed whole by media writers. (In the case of the Journal, which also counts a lot of bulk sales but with nowhere the egregiousness of USA Today, the rules also allow paid online subscribers to be counted as circulation.)

Since the days of Hearst and Pulitzer's battles, there have been, of course, many creative ways to hype circulation claims, by the way. For example, my local newspaper in Tucson amazes me each morning by proclaiming, on the top of its front page, that it has "238,700 readers weekdays." It escapes my comprehension how that remarkably precise number is arrived at, especially since the newspaper actually sells a mere 70,000 or so copies a day, and does not, to my knowledge, have any free circulation in the few hotels in town. I suspect this weird kind of arithmetic is still another legacy of Al Neuharth.

But I digress. The interesting news, to repeat, is that Choice Hotels has affirmed a commitment to a print newspaper, and chosen the Wall Street Journal to do so.

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What's Not Black and White Or Read All Over

[Doubletree Hotel Seattle, this morning]

[Updated]

USA Today, that traveler's insistent, gaudy would-be road companion, is deemphasizing its printed newspaper and betting on better fortunes in online-digital forms, including with iPhone and Android apps.

An era is ending.

Once derided as "Useless Today," the compact and colorful 28-year-old Gannett national paper has kind of insisted its way into our routine on the road, sometimes with very good journalism, though it chooses its shots selectively. But always, always, it has simply been there for us, usually for free, right outside our hotel room door. Gannett has always been very coy about how much of the "paid" circulation claimed for USA Today is acounted for by those free papers in hotels and airports.

USA Today, which likes to call itself the nation's second largest newspaper (though it publishes only five days a week and though I have always been very skeptical of its paid-circulation claims), said yesterday that it is cutting back at the print paper and focusing more on the online product.

That will mean about 130 layoffs, says the the paper, which employs a mere 1,500 total. USA Today didn't say how many of those 130 layoffs would be in the newsroom, which has a relatively small staff compared with the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. The Gannett newspaper empire, which owns 83 dailies, has always provided logistical and other resources to USA Today through its numerous local newspapers, often to the irritation of those local papers.)

The official line is that fewer people are paying for a newspaper because news is available for free online -- but that kind of covers up a well-known fact about USA Today. That is, most of us never paid for it in the first place. I myself have not once ever actually purchased a USA Today, and look at it only when a hotel gives it to me. Then I spend maybe 5 minutes on it.

And this from a lifelong print newspaper junkie.

Now, increasingly, I just leave USA Today outside the door. and I'm not the only one. I'm in a hotel in Seattle right now, and up and down the long corridor lie USA Todays untouched outside doors.

In fact, this tendency for hotel guests not even to pick up the free newspapers so annoyed J.W. Marriott Jr., the CEO of the Marriott hotel company, that he ordered Marriott's 2,600 U.S. hotels to stop leaving USA Today outside rooms last year. Bill Marriott thought the clutter in the corridors distracted from appearances. That decision contributed to a sharp drop in USA Today's claimed paid print circulation.

And here's a little secret about newspaper circulation. Thanks mostly to the forceful personality and lobbying of the flashy USA Today founder, longtime Gannett CEO and journalism buckaneer Al Neuharth, the industry audit organization that certifies print circulation went along with a new formula that greatly relaxed the rules under which newspapers could count so-called "bulk sales" as paid circulation.

Bulk sales are papers that go to places like hotels, which get them at a great discount off the cover price. It used to be that a bulk sale of 50 percent of cover price counted as paid circulation, but hotels and other businesses that distribute newspapers to guests have often concocted advertising barter deals that essentially mean no real money actually changes hands.

And the definition has also changed for bulk sales, which now fall under the category of "third-party sales," as defined by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the main circulation-audit firm. To wit:

"(b) All copies purchased by hotels, restaurants, airlines and rental car agencies for free distribution to their guests and by sponsors for free distribution to hospital patients and nursing home residents, regardless of the number of copies, will be reported as Third-Party Sales when at least one cent is paid, either in cash or by applicable barter. Evidence of this payment must be recorded and made available to ABC auditors."

And by the way, the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that is now generally called the nation's number one paper in circulation (though it publishes just 6 days a week), also is almost handing it out almost for free at times. I recently decided to renew both my print and online subscriptions to the Journal. What a deal I got! For $139, I got a whole year of print delivery to my home, as well as online access. The Journal, also, gets to claim its online paid subscribers as if they were full paid subscribers to the print paper.

So my $139 a year somehow counts as paid print circulation -- just the same as the $2 per copy I pay daily and $5 Sunday for the New York Times, which does not base its circulation of almost one million daily on giving the paper away in a hotel.

Just sayin'.

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