I know of a retail newsagent who cannot get the Winning Post. their distribution newsagent, who operates a competing retail newsagency, says it is not title for sub agents. No amount of representation has been able to change the situation. The retail newsagent has direct magazine accounts but not for newspapers. Each week they turn away Winning Post customers. It would appear that this is what the distribution newsagent wants.
The distribution newsagent should be penalised for this behaviour in my view. You are either a distribution newsagent or not.
One alternative for the retail newsagent is to encourage those looking for the publication to migrate online.
If i were a publisher the last place i would go to get my publication distributed would be any of the newspaper companies. As a retail only Newsagent i find it very difficult to accept magazines at half the commission, especially when they take up the same space and require probaly more work than titles from Network and GG. On the Winning Post problem if it were me i would let the publisher know of the problems of not getting supplied.
We have not received Winning Post since the floods came to Brisbane, until today. This follows weeks and weeks of phone calls and messages on Connect. We are a distribution agent and we deliver this title to subagents, so we have all been missing out. Nobody can seem to explain to me what the problem was and why we weren’t receiving it. Very frustrating for us and our subagent. I know this is a different theme to your post, Mark, but just had to vent my frustrations with Fairfax about this title.