A Hard-on for Numbers The Chron tries to stay, uh, abreast of circulation counts Newspapers everywhere are desperate to come up with new ways to produce high circulation figures. If the claims in a Harris County lawsuit are to be believed, the Houston Chronicle is a real leader in that effort. What was the Chron's trick? Offering readers compelling takes on hot topics? Brightening up its dreary pages with lively writing? No. Instead, the paper's reps took the independent auditors who monitor the circulation figures out to titty bars and kept them happy, liquored up and too distracted to count. That claim comes from depositions in a suit filed by Houston attorney Jerry Payne, best known for his long battle with the IRS over a stock deal. (A stock deal involving a "gentleman's club" Payne owned, coincidentally enough.) Payne represents former Chron distributors who say the paper routinely inflated its circulation, through either lascivious entertainment or such ruses as delivering hundreds of extra papers to schools involved in a reading program. The plaintiffs say they were fired for refusing to go along with the schemes. "It's all very real," Payne says. "There's no way in the world a jury will listen to these [former] managers and not believe it didn't happen." The trouble will be getting past the Chron's motion to dismiss the managers' case before trial through Texas's "employment at will" law, which offers workers few options to sue over termination. Chronicle attorney William Ogden calls the suit "frivolous" and the claims about bogus circulation numbers "completely false." As for the titty-bar allegations, Ogden labels them "a scurrilous thing that has nothing to do with this lawsuit." -- Richard Connelly http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2003-11-06/hairballs.html/1/index.html
