John Hirst's sidekick, Ben Gunn a lifer in Shepton Mallet and arch
opponent to Converse, complained to the Advertising Standards
Authority that Converse was making untrue claims in saying it was the
highest circulation national newspaper for prisoners.

Quite rightly the ASA investigated the claim we made and the
Investigation Report was out last Friday - it has to be ratified by
the ASA Council, but here is the verbatim report and their
recommendation that the complaint be dismissed.

_______

The Advertising Standards Authority has published the following
Adjudication on ConVerse.

A front page flash on ConVerse - a newspaper distributed to prisons -
stated "THE HIGHEST CIRCULATION NATIONAL NEWSPAPER FOR PRISONERS."

Issue: A reader in Shepton Mallet challenged whether the claim was
misleading and could be substantiated.

Response: ConVerse said the "highest circulation" claim was based on
the number of copies delivered to prisons. ConVerse said the Oxford
English Dictionary defined "circulation" as "the number of copies of
each issue of a newspaper, magazine, etc distributed."  They said they
believed their "highest circulation" claim was therefore likely to be
understood as referring to the number of copies distributed only.
They supplied figures, which they described as circulation figures,
published respectively in ConVerse and their competitor publication.
They believed the figures showed that, over the preceding 15 months,
ConVerse had circulated 52,000 copies more than the competitor
publication.  They said that amounted to an average of 3,500 more
copies per month, which they believed justified the "highest
circulation" claim.  They said that, in addition to England and Wales,
their competitor's publication was also circulated to prisons in
Scotland and Northern Ireland, and so their competitor's circulation
figures for England and Wales were in fact smaller than their total
circulation figure.  ConVerse said they conducted surveys with prisons
every six months to check that the newspaper was being received and
distributed satisfactorily and whether too many or too few were being
delivered.  They said that, for a prison population of 83,000
prisoners in England and Wales spread across 139 prisons, their latest
monthly figures (dated February 2009) were that they had printed
48,000. They said the "national" part of their claim referred to
England and Wales.  They said the Probation Service referred to itself
as the National Probation Service and its remit covered England and
Wales but not Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Assessment: Not upheld

The ASA considered it was reasonable for ConVerse to use the term
"national" within England and Wales to refer to distribution within
England and Wales.  We noted that the figures ConVerse had supplied
and described as circulation figures were in fact distribution
figures.  We noted that ConVerse had supplied print invoices that
showed their print run figures and that their print run figures
exceeded the distribution figures that the competitor publication
claimed for itself.  We considered that the term "circulation" was
open to interpretation to some extent and that, in some situations, it
could be understood to refer to the number of copies of a publication
that were sold.  In the context of a newspaper that was distributed
free of charge in prisons, however, and in the light of the print run
figures ConVerse had supplied, which exceeded the numbers claimed by
their competitor, we concluded that ConVerse had substantiated that
they printed and distributed more copies of their newspaper than their
competitor claimed and that the claim that they were the highest
circulation national newspaper for prisoners was therefore unlikely to
mislead readers.

We investigated the ad under CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation),
7.1 (Truthfulness) and 18.1 and 18.3 (Comparisons) but did not find it
in breach.