Quietly and without much fuss, ABC, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, just killed itself. And it may well take newspapers with it. An agreed proposal at ABC's March meeting means that publishers can now charge as little as 1c for their newspaper and still count them towards paid circulation. And they can opt in weekend subscribers to the daily edition without permission, as long as there is some way to opt out if the householder actually doesn't want it (how thoughtful!). Previously anything less than 25% of a declared full price just didn't count and subscribers had to actually want more newspapers in order to receive them. With newspapers thus able to distribute at an effectively free price (from next April), the value of a paid copy versus a free copy just disappeared. And with it so did the point of the ABC.

Now some change makes sense. The byzantine ABC rules which utilize a full armoury of reference, cross-reference and double-cross-reference to create rules, regulations, exceptions and allowances with a bunch of Roman numerals thrown in just in case you weren't confused already, have become a messy network of laws by which newspaper circulation departments must live and (News)die. And the fussy way ABC forces the classifying of sales looks silly next to the internet's broad brush stroke approach to reporting.

Newspapers have looked on with righteous envy as online circulation measurement services changed their rules at the request of their customers to make themselves look better. When the industry looked small, it was all about page impressions which made it look bigger than it was. When that started to look so big it was attracting skepticism, it was changed to unique monthly users, though what that measured was inconsistent and not entirely trustworthy. Now that video works online, time spent is being factored in. All the while newspapers were tied in knots filling in forms for the ABC and getting crucified for the odd innocent "exaggeration" here and there.

But newspapers probably needed to be protected from themselves by ABC rules. The reliability and dependability of ABC was the rock on which we sold our advertising story. And it has proved a very effective foundation for our business.

The rules are not final yet and are to be reviewed in July before implementation. But our industry has a history of short sighted self destruction. The legacy of numerous city cover price wars is still evident today in most American cities with a single surviving title exerting an unchallenged monopoly over the market, a monopoly which has allowed newspaper titles to ossify and avoid expensive innovation because, well, where else can our readers go? Now that they have plenty of places to go, the money that would have enabled real newsprint innovation is disappearing from our business and we haven't got the imagination or the cash to really make it happen.

Does it matter? Well, it will do when any circulation department in need of  few thousand readers runs an absurd discount program to bump up its numbers. And then they do it the next month too so it doesn't look bad. And so on. The best circulation departments have spent the past few years kicking this sort of addiction to quick meaningless circulation boosts. Now they are going to come under growing pressure from head office to put it all back in place.

So newspapers will drop prices to lower and lower levels, the ABC numbers will become meaningless to all major advertisers, and while we watch circulations rise again, and with them the cost of printing we will rail against advertisers who refuse to pay for access to our newly expanded audience because they don't trust our numbers any more because at 1c a copy they don't know who is and isn't actually reading the paper. Extra readers + extra cost + no new revenue = bankrupt PDQ.

Competition creates better newspapers. But price wars don't. They improve newspaper sales temporarily but in the UK it was the Guardian, who refused to play ball with Rupert Murdoch's Times price war, and who instead invested in imaginative editorial-driven ways to serve advertiser segments,  who came out of the war in best financial and readership shape when Murdoch finally gave up, many millions of wasted pounds later.

The industry most needs to be investing in smart new ways to emphasize the strengths of print. Instead, from next April when the rules come into play, we look set to spend our money printing more copies of the same newspaper and convincing ourselves that we have therefore magically become more popular. No one but us will be fooled.