The Audit Bureau of Circulations was formed in 1914, a golden era for newspaper wars, when newspapers were flooding advertisers with outrageous claims about their readership  to set prices for advertising.

An independent third-party auditor of newspapers’ records, ABC has since then become the standard measuring tool for newspaper circulation, because it can guarantee the application of a single standard across the board: in other words, aside from accuracy about any individual title, ABC figures offer comparability across titles on a standard set of criteria.

Gaming the ABC audit system is of course still possible. And off the record, newspaper publishers love to tell media reporters about dirty tricks their competitors are using to game their ABC audit numbers. But on the record, everyone reputable—including the Daily News and the New York Post—submits to the ABC audit process and uses ABC figures in materials they distribute to advertisers.

According to the most recent ABC report, the weekday editions of the Daily News sell an average of 632,595 copies; the New York Post comes in right behind that at 625,421. (Both newspapers are presently using these figures in advertising materials.)

Does that mean that the Daily News sells more copies off the newsstand than the Post every day? Not necessarily. Paid circulation measures a larger portion of the newspapers’ distribution methods than just newsstand sales—though in the case of both papers, the majority of their readers are found via sales at a newsstand and not doorstep delivery. “Sponsored” copies also count: that’s when you’re walking down the street and some guy says, “Free New York Post?” and you grab it, and there is an ad wrapped around the paper. The advertiser, not the reader, has paid for that issue.

But the numbers are close enough, and the figures are released infrequently enough, that the two papers have a pretty close-fought battle for readers every day. And since the newsstand is the place to grab them, having the right front page (or “wood,” as it was traditionally called) is an important weapon in each of their arsenals.

A couple of days ago, though, I performed an experiment. I stood for a while next to a newsstand in my subway station to watch people who approached the rack that contained the Post and the News to see how carefully they looked at the front page. When editors put together the front page of the paper, you imagine them imagining the reader looking at both covers, not carefully perhaps but purposefully, as if to decide which one to pick up. Almost nobody I saw hesitated for a moment: When they could see which flag was at the top of the page, they grabbed their paper, plunked down their coins at the counter and walked away. There is a tremendous amount of brand loyalty in the newspaper business; many readers, I concluded very unscientifically, will buy the Post or the News every morning regardless of what’s on the cover, according to their own regular morning habits.

This means that the battle of the front pages is taking place at the margins of each newspaper’s readership, which is an idea that makes sense to me intuitively. Still, the Wood is the only mechanism available to both publications that the public gets to see in operation every single morning. And it’s enough for me to know that the papers agonize over their covers every day, and have the specific purpose of knocking each other out of the game on a daily basis.

It’s strictly this front that we are measuring. ABC doesn’t tell us things like, “more people have been tempted away from their regular habit of buying the News by the front cover of a particular edition of the Post than vice versa.” So we have to wing it.

We agreed on a couple of things when we started this project. One was, no “draws.” We have to pick one. Otherwise where’s the fun in this exercise? The second was to call them as we see them. We happen to be an upper-middle-class, Eastern Queens–dwelling, white 36-year-old with a college degree, but also with enough experience in journalism, we think, to be able to figure out what these two newspapers are trying to get done with their demographics and to judge whether they are on the mark. There are no consolation prizes here, and no charity.

We’re also intentionally judging the salesmanship of the papers on the front pages. In our long notes about each day’s edition, we call out great stories and reporting when it seems relevant to decisions the publishers have made about the front page, like, “You had that great story about the man biting the dog: Why wasn’t that the cover?” But finally, it’s not the quality of the stories we’re comparing, but the selling of them on the cover of the paper.

So, why is the Post killing the Daily News so far in this exercise? Because its front pages have been better. Whether that’s enough to make the next ABC report reverse the Post and the News‘ circulation rankings remains to be seen.

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