RE:RE:RE:Posted to the Stockhouse T.TCL.A board. No replies yet@Tigers22, you've added to this discussion, and thank you for that. Your knowledge of printing mechanics is correct, up to a point. (You may not know that there is currently a severe global paper shortage, owing to supply chain issues, so your assumptions are around two years out of date about small quantities of newsprint costing the same as larger quantities.) On the other hand, your knowledge of defrauding advertisers seems very limited, and that's entirely to your credit.
Whether NOW is printing 1k, 10k, or 25k, it comes down to two things:
(1) If someone is encouraging advertisers to think they're paying for 76k circulation and they are getting a smaller quantity, it's called fraud in any case. It's exactly like Starbucks routinely selling you a "venti"-sized coffee and handing you a 4-ounce pour, with the assumption that you are too stupid and/or distracted to notice. Fraud is fraud, and that's all there is to it. U.S. newspaper advertising executives went to jail for this stunt. Kirk knows this.
(2) For the purpose of perpetuating circulation fraud, it matters less how many copies are coming off TC's presses, and more about how many are
actually reaching street boxes and pick-up points. The latter number appears to be zero. If you're suggesting that TC doesn't care if the full press run is not being distributed, but is in fact being immediately recycled after the presses stop, my point would be that they would then be complicit in the fraud. So, my earlier question remains: What are TC Transcontinental's obligations to report, if they are aware advertisers are being shortchanged?
And of course they are aware.
Tigers22 wrote: plating the pages costs so much that no one would do a run of 1000 copies. The paper is almost a nominal cost at that point. You might as well print 10K or 25K. Virtually the same price. TC probably prints the entirety of NOW's run in less than a half hour.