Clarion-Ledger to Independents: Drop Dead!

There’s been a controversy growing between the independent newspapers in Jackson, and the Clarion-Ledger lately:

A snippet from Jackson Free Press:

Clarion-Ledger to Independents: Drop Dead!

by Todd Stauffer
May 9, 2006

Want to know how far The Clarion-Ledger/Gannett Corp. is willing to go to control the competition? Keep reading.

This past Monday, I sat down in Cups in Fondren with Lee Warmouth, the circulation director of The Clarion-Ledger, so that he could tell me about an “exciting new service” that his company has devised for free-distribution papers like the Jackson Free Press.

Called The Distribution Network of Central Mississippi (TDN), The Clarion-Ledger’s service offers merchants in the area a special 12-cubby plastic box to put in front of their stores, thus eliminating the “clutter” of individual boxes and racks—weekly papers, monthly magazines, real estate guides, classifieds shoppers—that we find outside a lot of gas stations and retailers around town. There’s a solution for grocery stores and other retailers in town who have a proliferation of racks inside their stores, too.

Of course, there’s a catch. In order to get the rack, the retailer signs a one-year contract giving The Clarion-Ledger/Gannett Co. the exclusive right to control the display of free-distribution publications. Once you become a TDN stop, no one—including the Jackson Free Press—is allowed to put their own rack or box on the premises, even if it’s already one of our popular drops. We’re evicted.

That is, we’re evicted unless we pay for the “right” to place ourselves in their rack—to distribute in places where we used to distribute simply with the permission of the manager or owner. [More]

If you want to follow the news, you can check JFP’s “Goliath” blog.