In the end, the numbers told a story the experts said they would.

NADbank 1999 confirmed that The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star lost readers to the National Post, while The Toronto Sun sailed unscathed through the battle for Canada’s daily newspaper readers.

But even as Conrad Black is celebrating the fact that he was able to mark new territory with advertisers and readers alike, the publishers of The Globe, the Star and the Sun have been busy putting a positive spin on the results.

Douglas Knight, publisher of the Sun, positively gloats as he claims increases in advertising, circulation and readership – without having given away a single copy during the survey period.

As the only paper in North America that does not sell subscriptions, except to its Sunday edition – it’s classed as a single-copy-only publication – Knight says the Sun successfully fought to maintain its position in a volatile marketplace where ‘free papers are the bullets of choice.

‘One thing you might conclude is that all those free papers don’t lead to more readers,’ he says. ‘We now call it the fifth daily, but we calculate that there are in the neighbourhood of 160,000 free and virtually free papers available in Toronto every day now.

Lest anyone think otherwise, the release of NADbank will not put an end to the heated battle between the Post and Globe but, rather, it will add third-party research to the arsenal.

Don Babick, publisher of the National Post, is extremely happy at his paper’s showing, particularly the fact that the Post is shown to have 6.2% penetration against The Globe’s 6.4% in the 16 common markets in which they were measured across the country.

‘To be within spitting distance of (The Globe), I’m more than just ecstatic,’ says Babick, ‘especially in key markets such as Ottawa and Vancouver where we’ve passed The Globe in readership.’

Babick says October was the Post’s best month ever for advertising revenue and that November promises to surpass that.

He believes third-party numbers will draw in advertisers who were waiting for a clearer picture of the Post’s position, and also give the paper the leverage it needs to bring in primary rather than supplementary portions of advertising campaigns.

For his part, Phillip Crawley, publisher and CEO of the Globe, says he doesn’t believe overall readership in the Toronto market has really dropped 4.5% – that it’s merely the temporary result of all the promotions and free papers in the marketplace.

‘How can you have a situation where last year there were only three papers, this year there’s four – and with all the money spent, all the extra sections, pages, activity – and tell us there was a 4.5% decline in total readership?’ he asks.

‘That flies in the face of logic,’ he says. ‘I think it’s just that NADbank was given an impossible challenge this year – to measure a market that is so distorted by the vast volumes of free copies.’

Not unexpectedly, Crawley says the key demographic areas in which The Globe has been traditionally strong continue to be supported by the NADbank 1999 results.

‘Nationally, with household income over $100,000, we have a 37% lead over the Post,’ he boasts. ‘We’re feeling very positive about the ability of the paper to reach the top scale demographics by education, by income, by job category.’

At the Star, meanwhile, publisher John Honderich says the NADbank figures confirm his paper’s leadership position in the Greater Toronto Area.

There’s a decline in daily readership, he admits, but he says the weekly figures show the Star hasn’t lost out to its competitors.

‘You look at the cumulative weekly readership, we’re just off two per cent, which is within the margin of error. During the week people might be trying different papers, but when you look at the percentage of readers who are reading the Star at the end of the week, we come out virtually the same [as 1998].’

Honderich is also very pleased with the Star’s exclusive readership numbers, often a critical factor in media buying decisions.

He says the Star’s exclusive readership of 22.1% – although down from 24.4% last year – is still more than the Sun (11.62%), The Globe (3.85% down from 6.5%), and the Post (3.3%) all together.