I met with a group of newsagents in Sydney yesterday and the issue of who owns the home delivery customer came up. It’s a question newsagents have had since newspaper distribution was deregulated in 1999.

Newsagents believe that a customer they convince to take on home delivery is theirs. Publishers believe that anyone receiving home delivery of their product is theirs – regardless of how the customer was acquired.

A lawyer friend told me today that in his view, the 1999 contracts are vague on this point.

It’s an issue right now because publishers want newsagents to pass on more data about home delivery customers. They want customer name, address and the days on which the customer gets their particular newspaper. In many cases this is data about customers the publishers have never heard of before, customers won by the newsagent’s own efforts.

My lawyer friend tells me that privacy laws come into play on this issue and that newsagents need to be very careful about what information they provide to publishers. He even suggested that newsagents need to write to their customers seeking permission before passing on any home delivery customer information.

All the legal mumbo jumbo aside, where else can a business acquire customers at their cost and then be required to provide sufficient details to their supplier (for no compensation) to enable the supplier to undertake direct contact and fulfillment if they wish.

“We’re in a transformative media age. We’re seeing the vanishing of mass media. Mass media is being replaced by customized, targeted media….The old adage ‘adapt or die’ has never been more pressing.”

That’s Jordan Levin speaking at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills. Variety has the story. The newsagency channel was created by mass media companies.

The Brisbane Times news site from Fairfax Media is growing in popularity as this daiily reach graph from Alexa shows:

According to Alexa, only 5% of traffic goes to the blogs on the site.

Fairfax has broken with convention in their launch of The Form in NSW as a separate title on April 20. The Form is not as separate as it seems. While the title has its own identity, distribution is tied to the Sydney Morning Herald – home delivery customers who stop their SMH delivery need to have the delivery of their free copy of The Form stopped at the same time. What this means is that newsagents either need software changes to automate the process of handling the two titles as one or the newsagent needs to remember to check whether a customer is getting The Form. While many customer stops will be for the whole of the account and not matter, some will be for one or two of the titles on order and this is where newsagent memory or processes will be essential. If a newsagent forgets to stop The Form they’ll have angry customers to deal with.

Delivery newsagents will receive 15 cents a copy for delivering The Form. For most, this is break even. For others it will be loss making. Retail newsagents will receive 10 cents a copy for which they need to display the title next to the SMH. With this shopping centre space costing around $1,500 per square metre a year, The Form will be loss making.

Fairfax could have been smarter about this. For example, keeping the title within the newspaper or having a separate price so the title stands on its own.

Newsagents are time poor enough. They have just lost more time thanks to Fairfax.

UPDATE. Here are two valuable contributions I received from newsagents late today on this issue:

A more immediate threat is the availability of both time and available space involved with the delivery of early morning product . Should an estimated 40% of Fairfax customers request delivery of their free The Form we are required to find space for an additional 80-160 copies of this additional publication within our vehicles that already accommodate a full load of Newcastle Heralds, SMH , Telegraph and to a lesser extent Australian & Fin Review (with magazine) on Fridays !!!!!!!!! Presently Newcastle Newsagents would deliver an average 350 Newcastle Herald , 120 Telegraph and 60+ SMH on a usual Friday plus the smaller titles – there ain’t much space left.
It will be very interesting at about 6-30am this Friday when the punters finally realize that their Friday Fairfax Newspaper does not contain The Form , ( despite an extensive Radio and print advertising campaign ) and promptly phone their local Newsagent to make a very loud complaint.

If The Form lives up to its hype you also need to consider the possible loss of sales of publications like “The Sportsman” and “Winning Post” – $1.20 compared to $5.00, and you get a free paper. Not only is it a cost burden on the Newsagent, it reduces his income as well.