Rules & ResourcesFarm Publication Support Center
Demographic Reporting (Effective June 2005)
Effective with June 2005 Publisher’s Statements, ABC’s board moved to modify Rule E 5.4, Distribution by Demographics, to define reporting parameters and formats for all single-issue analyses included in ABC farm publication Publisher’s Statements.
Revised rule language reads as follows:
E 5.4 Distribution by Demographics
A demographic edition of a publication shall be considered those copies of a publication which are directed to a group of subscribers with similar demographic characteristics, for whom the publisher has obtained individual demographic information. Copies of a publication which do not meet this definition but are distributed by selected geographical areas shall not be considered a demographic edition.
Publishers may include as a supplement to farm publication Audit Reports and Publisher’s Statements an analysis for one issue of the total paid subscription and qualified non-paid recipient circulation identifying the subscriber/recipient by degree of farm interest and/or by involvement in farming.
(a) The data shall be compiled by the publisher and verified by Bureau auditors and shall be based on an actual count and analysis of the mail circulation for the issue analyzed.
(b) The classification assigned by the publishers must be based on information obtained from business cards, letterheads, recognized directories, questionnaires, subscription orders, telephone interviews or other acceptable evidence.
(c) The reporting format shall be by paid, qualified non-paid and total and must be by breaks shown in standard United States Census of Agriculture for United States based publications, and the Canadian Census of Agriculture for Canadian-based publications. The format for each publication will be approved by the Bureau in advance of its first publication in Bureau reports. National or regional agriculture census data may be reported alongside the publisher’s data. The reporting of a percentage for each category and a cumulative percentage is also optional.
Where questionnaires are used to obtain specific information concerning a subscriber’s job function, the questionnaire shall be written so as to determine the most important or primary interest in the field served by the publication.
All such data must be carefully preserved for the auditor’s examination. The Bureau reserves the right to subject the assigned classifications to verification letter tests if for any reason the evidence produced is not considered to be sufficiently conclusive.
In the event of a change in census data reporting, publishers will have three years from the census release date to make the change within their demographic reporting.
Age of information used for classification purposes shall be reported.
Posted 4/19/04
