Lighter by 2,000 Suns?
Some readers of Portland’s new, semi-daily, free newspaper, The Portland Daily Sun, were understandably confused by a discrepancy in its pages. Ads promoting advertising in the Sun claimed its circulation is 5,000 copies, a figure its owners also claimed in interviews with other media. But its masthead consistently contained a line saying the Sun’s circulation is only 3,000.
Typo? Well, maybe.
“We did 3,000 and wandered up to about [5,000],” editor and cofounder Curtis Robinson said earlier this week. But even he sounded confused. “That may not be true,” he added later. “We may have been printing [5,000] all along…. In the masthead, we were just being hyper-conservative.”
Consider them liberal again. After The Bollard’s interview with Robinson, the circulation figure in the masthead was changed to 5,000.
Actual readership is anyone’s guess. Robinson said he does not know how many issues are returned unread, though a recent count put the figure around 1,200. “Probably we ought to get an average of how many we move a day,” he said. “That’s something that we’ll nail down.”
Hammer away, bro.
— Chris Busby
