Sunni Boot, president and CEO of ZenithOptimedia Canada, has been named chair of the Canada board for the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Boot was elected to the position at the newly formed committee’s meeting in Toronto on July 16. Dennis Skulsky, president and CEO of Canwest Publishing, will fill the position of vice-chair.
ABC spokesperson Kammi Altig said Boot’s appointment brings the Canadian group’s organizational structure in line with that of the general ABC board.
“At their first meeting, they decided it would be good to have a buyer and a publisher in the chair and vice-chair positions, so Sunni was elected to represent the buyers’ position,” said Altig. “It mirrors the North American setup, where the buyer is always the chair.”
At the same meeting, the ABC Canada board approved the establishment of a set of rules that would apply to consumer and business magazines in the Canadian marketplace. Whereas ABC’s previous rule book presented all of the rules governing both Canadian and U.S. magazines in the same section, a separate section is now devoted to the Canadian versions of the rules.
According to Altig, this process was largely a “cut and paste” job in which American terms such as “zip code” were replaced by the relevant Canadian terminology. She added that no new rules had been created for Canada.
“What we did here is take all the old rules that applied to both markets and split them up, so that the U.S. rules only contain things pertinent to the U.S. and the rules for Canada only contain things that speak to the Canadian market,” she said. “Going forward, the two groups will look at and modify their rules separately.”
The changes represent another step in ABC’s continuing effort to recognize the distinct needs of Canadian publishers, said Altig.
At its July 16 meeting, the ABC Canada board also voted to strike down a rule that had allowed third-party sponsor distributors to pay for sponsorships through bartering—for example, the provision of concert tickets equal to the monetary value of the sponsorship.
The ABC’s general board meeting in Chicago last week also resulted in several new developments, among them the approval of a new ABC Community Newspaper Audit service dedicated to publications with a paid circulation under 25,000. If given final approval at the board’s next meeting in November, the service will be available to community newspapers in Canada and the U.S. by Jan. 1.
“This is an acknowledgment that smaller newspapers have different reporting needs and audit requirements than their larger counterparts,” said Altig.
On the magazine side, the board agreed to explore solutions to remedy flaws in the industry’s scan-based system, which, according to Altig, does not provide adequate per-issue data and does not provide publishers and buyers information about “shrink”—the number of magazines a publisher delivers to retail outlets minus the unsold copies.
