Newsday has this
amazing story about how their circulation department pumped up figures– keep delivering to people who had canceled their subscriptions.

“People would come out of their houses saying, ‘I don’t want it! Stop it!’ What the agents would finally do is not deliver. They would then go to what was termed ‘alternative forms of distribution.’ “

Some distributors, he said, would ‘sell them for a nickel or give them away to a wholesaler who would sell to bodegas for a nickel apiece. But there were no returns. Even sell them in Jersey. ‘It doesn’t matter where you get rid of them.’ ‘

A distributor who formerly worked out of Newsday’s Brentwood depot and asked not to be identified said he too ran into problems with Code 51. Despite complaining to the paper that the customers on the list did not want the paper, or refused to pay for it, he was told to continue to drop off papers anyway.

‘The point was to drive circulation up,’ he said. ‘And we were told not to take any names off the computer even if they were dead. We could not get customers off the records. We even delivered to addresses where the house had been burned down.'”