Geist fired by auditor
There must be more to this story: Geist magazine has been expelled by BPA Worldwide, the circulation audit firm, effective April 26. The text of the announcement:
All comment and background gratefully received.
At a meeting of the BPA Worldwide Executive Committee held on April 6, 2006, the Committee voted to terminate the BPA Worldwide membership of The Geist Foundation,for violation of Section 10.1.3 of BPA Worldwide Bylaws in that it failed to allow BPA Worldwide to complete an audit for the twelve-month period ending March 2005.The last audit report for GEIST was for the three-month period ended March 2004.Usually, a magazine that is cheesed off with its auditor or the results of its audits, resigns.
All comment and background gratefully received.
posted by D. B. Scott at
3:33 pm
4 Comments:
Knowing nothing about the particulars of this situation, I'm perfectly suited to jumping in on this...
Circulation audits are a royal pain, requiring a lot of work for small publishers' small staffs, as well as some special requirements that many small mags can't fully address through their fulfillment software. So there may be nothing more to this than "we never had the time to get around to it".
But I'm sure they'll resolve the situation eventually.
I agree, smaller publications often do not have sufficient staff to undergo a circulation audit. This may have been a case where an audit was started but never completed at the publisher's discretion (i.e. not wanting to incur additional audit costs, no longer having a need for audited information).
I understand how irritating the audit requirements are for a small publication. But it doesn't quite explain why they simply didn't withdraw or resign as many others have done (and will doubtless do in future). Maybe, as you say, the publisher decided to just ignore it and let it go away, as it has. But leaving something of a stain on the magazine's reputation.
It is my understanding that in order to withdraw or resign from a circulation audit, the publication still has to undergo an audit for those claims that have not been audited.
If Geist simply decided to quit during the audit, the numbers in the marketplace would remain unaudited. The only option is to be terminated if a "final" audit was not performed.
Seeing how Geist is a smaller literary magazine, they likely did not have the means to undergo the audit on the numbers already in the marketplace.
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