Media Forum: Will clients quit freesheets?

Could the row between freesheets affect ad revenues, Alasdair Reid asks.

Hats (or helmets, even) off to Associated Newspapers for introducing us all to former Detective Inspector Phillip Swinburne. A white-bearded and bespectacled figure wearing a trench coat sort of thing (closer to Clouseau than Columbo), Swinburne seems a rather lugubrious character And you can see why. Invited by the publishers to prolong his career, pursuing his investigations down the shadiest alleyways off London's mean streets, he gets the result of his life.

No mutilated corpse here, however. No, his big discovery is a bundle of unwanted newspapers in a bin. And should you have missed last week's ad campaign, the results of his investigation can be seen on thisislondon.co.uk/dumping.

Yes, it's the row between News International and Associated Newspapers Associated has discovered that some distributors of thelondonpaper are sometimes tempted to cut out the middle man - and Inspector Knacker was handily placed to furnish the evidence. News International retaliated by publishing pictures showing piles of copies of the Associated title, London Lite, similarly dumped.

The timing of this row could hardly be worse because Westminster Council is already threatening to ban both titles if they don't do more to alleviate the litter problems they cause. Now, the Audit Bureau of Circulations has been forced to investigate whether there are intractable irregularities in the figures they audit on the freesheets. The ultimate sanction could be a withdrawal of ABC certification.

So, just how damaging could this whole row prove to be - not just to the two titles themselves but to the cause of commuter freesheets? Lawson Muncaster, the managing director of City AM, is optimistic that the market will continue to see the big picture.

He says: 'All papers have rogue distributors and any time you see a pile of dumped newspapers, no matter what title it is, it's bad for the newspaper industry. It's the sort of thing we take very seriously - and if we have a rogue distributor, we fire them immediately. I wouldn't have done what Associated and News International have been doing - I would have focused my efforts instead in pointing out how many more people a reading a newspaper in London in the afternoon these days.'