In re Eureka Reporter, (— Cal.Rptr.3d —, 2008 WL 2932068, Cal.App.1 Dist., July 31, 2008), a California Court of Appeal reviewed a dispute between two competing newspapers over whether one of them, which was distributed for free but accepted donations from some of its readers, qualified as a “newspaper of general circulation,” pursuant to Government Code Section 6000, thereby qualifying it to accept certain types of legal advertising.
The court ruled that the readers who voluntarily donated to the paper did not constitute a “bona fide list of paying subscribers,” and it therefore did not meet the requirements of Section 6000 and was not a “newspaper of general circulation.”
Facts
Judi Pollace, publisher of the Eureka Reporter (“Reporter”), petitioned the Humboldt County Superior Court to declare it a newspaper of general circulation. As required, she stated that the Reporter had “a bona fide list of paying subscribers in Humboldt County and has an average daily circulation of 24,000."
A competing paper, the Eureka Times-Standard (“Times-Standard”), opposed the motion, arguing that because the Reporter was distributed for free, it did not have a bona fide list of paying subscribers. Pollace responded that the contributors who voluntarily donated to the Reporter did constitute such a list. The superior court said the voluntarily payments were sufficient to meet the statutory standard and entered a judgment declaring the Reporter to be a newspaper of general circulation. The Times-Standard appealed.
Decision
The question hinged on whether the Reporter’s voluntarily paying customers constituted a “bona fide list of subscribers” within the meaning of Section 6000, the court said. The court turned to various dictionary definitions to answer the question.
Those dictionaries defined “subscriber” as one who “contracts to receive and pay for a certain number of issues of a publication,” and one who “receives a periodical or service regularly on order.” They defined “subscription” as “a purchase by prepayment of the future issues of a periodical usually for a fixed period,” and “an arrangement for providing, receiving, or making use of something of a continuing or periodic nature on a prepayment plan.”
The Reporter readers who voluntarily paid for it did not “contract” to receive a certain number of issues of the publication, the court said. Nor did they prepay in advance before receiving it or agree to pay for the paper for a fixed period of time. “In this context, a voluntary contribution is not akin to a subscription, which obligates the customer to pay a sum of money before receiving a future issue of a periodical,” the court said.
Therefore, the voluntary payers could not, by plain language, be construed as a bona fide subscription list and the Reporter did not meet the requirements of Section 6000 and could not be deemed a newspaper of general circulation. As such, the judgment was reversed.