The News Minute | September 16, 2014 | 10.40 am ISTTwo of the country’s oldest newspapers Hindustan Times and The Times of India appear to be having a big argument. The two papers have been traditional rivals for readership in the country’s Capital.Since June, when The Economic Times first published its report on the findings of the Indian Readership Survey for the year 2013, the two media houses have published reports in their respective newspapers countering each other’s claims. BCCL even ran advertisements regarding this. Readership and circulation figures are important because they are very important for newspapers, advertisers, ad agencies, and media planners.On Tuesday, Hindustan Times reported that it has filed an FIR with the Delhi police, complaining that thousands of copies of the newspaper have been mysteriously disappearing across the city.HT officials have received complaints from dozens of subscribers, who say their morning newspaper had not reached them. According to an estimate by the newspaper, over one lakh copies have been removed from the market in an organised manner, sometimes being bought up at more than double the cover price. The HT report also said that the timing of the disappearance of copies of its newspaper coincided with the launch of a publication called Morning Star by a “competition newspaper”. Tuesday’s report on HT comes after an article published by The Times of India on Monday, titled: TOI Challenge: Making sense of HT’s amazing circulation numbers. The report says that HT’s circulation figures for Delhi submitted to the Audit Bureau of Circulation includes the figures for HT 2 Minutes, which is a shorter version of the newspaper having not more than 12 pages and priced at Rs. 1.25 against the regular newspaper which is priced at Rs 4.50. However, considering the language of the TOI report, it appears that for TOI at least, the figures are important for the advertisements they bring in. The report says that HT 2 Minutes “carries only a small proportion of the ads that appear in the main newspaper. For instance, between September 1 and 6 this year, it carried less than 30% of these ads. From an advertiser's viewpoint, this means that as much as 26% of HT's circulation in Delhi NCR, in all likelihood, does not carry its ads. Moreover, the ones that do get carried might not even reach the English-speaking reader that they were originally intended for.”The report ended with: “TOI sought to clear the fog on numbers with a presentation to a power-packed gathering of the top 200 media professionals and planners in Delhi and Mumbai on Friday. The presentation had a focused message — TOI's fully loaded edition (the regular copies that carry supplements and are listed in ABC as 'single' and 'combo') is 38% ahead of HT in the Delhi NCR market in terms of circulation, according to ABC's figures for July-Dec 2013)”The battle first started with a June 13 report in Economic Times with the headline “All Down & 0ut, HT Up and About, Media industry foxed”. The report said: “Even as most newspaper titles across genres show sharp declines, one media group has surprisingly bucked the trend across the board with a uniformly upward trajectory — the Hindustan Times group. Amongst the English national dailies, for instance, Hindustan Times saw its readership grow 13%. The three other top dailies (which had combined circulation almost three times that of HT in the 2012 round), all saw drops in readership. The Times of India fell by 5%, The Hindu by a staggering 32% and The Telegraph by a huge 26%.” The report says that HT had also managed to “buck national readership trends” when it came to readership per copy. A day after the Economic Times report was published, Hindustan Times published countered with a report of its own titled: “TOI cannot digest readership survey findings, shoots messenger”. One by one, HT challenged the claims ET made in its report and even went on to discuss the methodology used by the research firm when it conducted the readership survey. HT refuted ET’s claim that Hindustan Times was the only newspaper to have posted a rise in readership. HT said Rajasthan Patrika too saw an increase in readership. It quoted a Times of India report, which said that its readership had grown in Maharashtra.The HT report said: “While HT has made substantial gains overall, it is also true that TOI readership figures have grown by 34% in Mumbai and 22% in Bangalore. HT has witnessed a drop of 12% in Delhi and 31% in Punjab — a fact conveniently glossed over by ET.”It also said: “The ET story on Friday also claims that HT’s Readership Per Copy (RPC) is abnormally high. A careful study of figures reveals that ET has picked readership figures from one period, and circulation figures from another — which has thrown up distorted results. HT’s RPCs are lower than that claimed by the story.” (RPC is Readership Per Copy)Moving away from the claims of the ET report, Hindustan Times said: “TOI’s inconsistency is not merely with regard to facts and figures, but their overall approach to the new IRS survey” it then explained that for the Indian Readership Survey 2013, AC Nielsen had been awarded the contract to conduct the survey and that a new methodology was adopted.The HT report also said that the Rahul Kansal, executive president of Bennett, Coleman and Co Ltd, had told Mint in January that the new methodology was “far more tamper-proof and secured it against the vagaries of poor field work”. A month later TOI had changed its mind, forming an alliance with some other newspapers to challenge the IRS findings. For more, read TOI retaliates to HT's IRS embrace, launches advertiser initiative, Hindustan Times counters the TOI challenge and ET's story is factually inconsistent and unfortunate: Shantanu Bhanja