The Audit Bureau of Circulation released it’s bi-annual Fas-Fax report within the past week, and there have been plenty of headlines about big declines at big newspapers.

In a previous post, I suggested that Alan Jacobson talk about how circ is doing at newspapers he’s redesigned. In concert with that post, I wrote to E&P reporter Jennifer Saba and suggested she acquire the full Fas-Fax report, or at least the top 150 markets, and publish it. Her response: Request the report yourself. She referred me to the Fas-Fax Web site.

Interestingly, the ABC will only release the report to “accredited press,” whatever that means. And by that, I mean, there is no agency that credentials members of the press (unless you count local law enforcement, which hardly seems relevant to an ABC report).

I’ve only assumed so far, and maybe it’s a false assumption, that a blogger working independently would not rise to the level of credentialed in the eyes of ABC.

I have no idea why E&P wouldn’t want to request the entire report, but it bugs me that they won’t. Maybe there is some logical explanation.

Meanwhile, E&P has posted a story about small papers with circulation gains — it seems to be a largely self-reporting effort (newspapers telling E&P of their own circulation gains). Still, it’s an interesting list — circ is looking good at many small papers.

I’d like to know more. I’d like to see the Fax-Fax for at least the top 150 markets.

UPDATE: Ms. Saba sends this e-mail:

I think there’s a misunderstanding regarding my response. I *have* the full FAS-FAX report which includes 770 dailies. The report is organized alphabetically, by paper. It does not rank the papers in any order. ABC provided a separate list ranking the top 25 papers based on the FAS-FAX.

I get requests for lots of reports — circulation and otherwise — and I cannot pass them along. Reporters receive reports because of that caveat. I’m happy to send people directly to the source, which I did when you requested.

My question back, then, is why hasn’t she published the 770 dailies numbers?

UPDATE II: Newsdesigner.com obtained some of the numbers I couldn’t (maybe I didn’t try hard enough, but it just seems reasonable to me that E&P would publish this data — or have done the redesign story itself (and maybe it has by this point, but I haven’t seen it)).

[tags]newspapers, redeisgn, circulation, abc[/tags]