The News Limited consultation came to see us today to talk about the home delivery data situation. What he was particularly interested in was Victoria and Queensland. It is part of their ongoing program to improve their distribution system.
We told them that we thought the existing systems in Victoria were okay, better than the systems say in NSW.
The issue came up of XChangeIT something that News Limited has been considering for many years. The problem here is that only half the newsagents have it. Even less, if you include people with News Limited accounts who are not newsagents. Furthermore, that they would need to change many newsagents existing procedures for them to get sales data as few invoice newspapers daily.
The problems we saw with the existing data system is that.
1) A reconciliation of a News Limited account is extremely difficult.
2) Orders get changed without warning so someone that works out exactly what they require can suddenly find that they have been cut back by 10% leaving them with a terrible problem of what to do.
We told them that we felt the best ones to discuss the situation with was the newsagency associations, and we were very pleased to hear that they had just spoken with VANA and were going to be talking soon to the ANF.
