I used to meet with the circulation director every few months to find ways to pad out the circulation. He always had a range of options that involved artificially increasing the numbers. But whenever we got really desperate he would advise we resort to the “pier method”. The first time he mentioned this, I asked him what was involved. “It’s simple,” he said. “You just drive the truck up to the end of the pier and dump all the papers off the edge.” And he wasn’t joking.