The Charleston City Paper recently reported that its city is facing a scheme similar to the Gannett Corp.‘s struggling TDN distribution scheme to control local free-publication distribution in Jackson and other cities. The JFP's Todd Stauffer, who has helped lead a national effort to push back TDN and to educate consumers about the anti-competitive implications, is quoted in the article:
By the time Gannett's box program had made it to Jackson, Miss., the local alternative weekly, the Jackson Free Press, had gotten wind of the trouble ahead. Like Greenville, Gannett's Clarion-Ledger had spawned its own faux alt-weekly, and the JFP bristled at the idea of paying a competitor for space, says publisher Todd Stauffer. The estimated cost for the space was $10,000 a year, but had the potential to reach more than $20,000 as more of the Gannett boxes proliferated.
"We were convinced it was more an attempt to control the space than to profit from it," he says.
What concerned Stauffer was that, when approaching long-faithful distributors about the boxes, they had been told by Gannett that JFP was on board. The weekly contacted distributors to correct Gannett's assertion, but the feisty alt didn't stop there. It developed a blog chronicling its fight against the boxes and established a petition for JFP readers to sign in support of the paper. Some distributors came back over time while others told Gannett to take the large boxes back as soon as they arrived, Stauffer says.
Recognizing that clutter may be a legitimate concern for some distributors, Stauffer and the publishers of other publications developed the Mississippi Independent Publisher's Alliance and distributed their own consolidated boxes. While the boxes have slowed distribution in some spots, with space for only a small percentage of what would fit in a traditional rack, their proliferation in gas stations and shopping centers in suburban areas has actually expanded JFP's reach.
"It's a net positive for us," Stauffer says. "It's kind of centralized our distribution for those spots."
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