CIRC LAWSUITS JUST KEEP ON COMING.

Fallout from last summer's circulation scandals continued in recent weeks, as advertisers in Milwaukee sued their hometown paper claiming the paper had fudged its circulation numbers for almost a decade, while stockholders in Tribune Co. -- or at least lawyers -- claimed that inflated circulation affected the worth of their holdings.

In late April Shorewest Realtors of Brookfield, Wis., filed a class action suit against Journal Sentinel Inc. and its Milwaukee Journal Sentinel -- the largest division of publicly traded Journal Communications Inc. -- saying that the paper had "artificially inflated [advertising] rates to surreptitiously overcharge" the company.

The apparent crux of the complaint rests on the fact that less than three months into her tenure as the Journal Sentinel's new publisher, Elizabeth Brenner sought resignations from three executives in the circulation and marketing departments.

Brenner characterized those departures as a desire for better leadership and for tightened overall procedures. She denied that there were any irregularities similar to those found last summer at Newsday, the Chicago Sun-Times or the Dallas Morning News.

In an interview with a Journal Sentinel reporter, Joseph Horning, president of Shorewest, said that the lawsuit was based on information brought to the company by current and former Journal Sentinel employees.

Journal Communications said in a filing March 10, g with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had "initiated a review of its circulation practices and made self-deductions from its net paid circulation for its [ABC] Publisher's Statement for the period ending March 31, 2005, in consultation with the ABC.

The suit alleges that the Journal Sentinel raised its circulation figures by giving papers away for free, donating them to schools, merely throwing them away and complex third-party resale agreements.

Starting last Monday, at least five law firms from around the country had filed class-action suits against Tribune Co., saying that the company and its top executives had covered up or "recklessly disregarded" the circulation fraud at Newsday.

They all alleged that Tribune officers and directors violated the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.

And the suits all indicate that Tribune's stock dropped from a high of $48.19 on June 7 -- days before the Newsday scandal was revealed -- to a low of $41.58 on July 15, the day the company admitted that circulation numbers for the previous three years had been inflated.

Of the five firms attempting to become the lead lawyers representing the plaintiffs, three are also involved in a similar suit filed last summer against Belo Corp., publisher of the Dallas Morning News, another paper that has admitted circulation fraud.

At the Northern Illinois District of the U.S. District Court -- where the Tribune suit will be tried -- the lawyers are all competing to see who will get to represent the class' lead plaintiff. Of course, at this point there is no one actual Tribune shareholder who has come forward, but there certainly will be. In Milwaukee, I suspect there are equal quantities of revenge and wishful thinking at work.