Every Wednesday I deliver about 4000 copies of “The Commons”, a weekly newspaper which is familiar to most of the people reading this.
This Wednesday, something very mysterious happened – most of the papers I delivered have disappeared.
It is as if someone was following me around and removing the papers from the racks I filled just a few minutes before.
Got any ideas?
The thick plottens
From an article in “The Keene Sentinel:
Missing newspapers in Brattleboro spark issue of what’s free and what’s stealing Matt Nanci Sentinel Staff Friday, July 3, 2015
BRATTLEBORO — When about 1,500 copies of The Commons went missing Wednesday, the newspaper lost about 17 percent of its circulation. But is it illegal to take a free publication? The answer, it seems, depends on who you ask.
Jeffrey P. Potter, the editor and operations manager of The Commons, said he believes the incident was, indeed, illegal.
The Commons is run by Vermont Independent Media, a nonprofit corporation, and began as a monthly newspaper in 2006. Since 2010, the paper has been published weekly.
Its single-copy plus subscription circulation varies between 8,500 and 9,000, and it’s distributed throughout Vermont’s Windham County, according to Potter.
The Brattleboro Police Department was contacted, but because The Commons is a free publication, it doesn’t view the incident as a crime, according to Potter.
And John Treadwell, the assistant attorney general in the criminal division in the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, told The Sentinel Thursday he couldn’t think of any criminal statute that would have been violated.
“I’m unaware of any state law that would make it a crime to take multiple copies of a free product,” he said.
Brattleboro police did not respond for comment Thursday or this morning.
The papers’ disappearance was discovered Wednesday evening after one of the distributors noticed one of the vending boxes she recently filled was empty.
Then she checked the other vending boxes of the approximately six the paper has in downtown Brattleboro and those were empty too, according to Potter.
The newspapers were also gone from local businesses such as the Brattleboro Food Co-op on Main Street, which receives 300 papers, he said.
Potter said two witnesses say they saw a tall, dark-haired man in his late 30s or early 40s who was removing the newspapers from downtown.
“Honestly, it is a mystery” why someone would do this, Potter said.
This week’s edition of The Commons features front-page stories about state officials’ frustration at the latest Vermont Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel, how two daughters reunited with their mother after being separated for decades, and layoffs at the Brattleboro Reformer.
Barry L. Aleshnick, the distribution coordinator and chairman on the board of directors of Vermont Independent Media, said there’s plenty of precedent that shows what occurred Wednesday is a crime.
The Student Press Law Center lists on its website five cases from across the country where the theft of college newspapers were successfully prosecuted.
The Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization advocates for student First Amendment rights, for freedom of online speech, and for open government on college campuses, according to its website.
Aleshnick said a legal adviser at the New England Newspaper & Press Association is writing a legal brief for Brattleboro police that will explain why what happened is a crime.
Even though The Commons is free for the public to grab, there are direct costs to producing a newspaper, and the company lost several thousand dollars when its newspapers were taken, according to Aleshnick.
“That was money and product that we produced for the benefit of the public, and the public is not getting it,” he said.
Potter agrees.
“People need the news and people paid for ads to get out there,” he said.
The Commons has experienced an incident like this before, albeit on a smaller scale in 2012, according to Potter. In that instance, someone was emptying one vending box over a period of weeks, he said.
However, in that case, Brattleboro police conducted an investigation and helped the newspaper resolve the issue, according to Aleshnick.
He said police used nearby security cameras to identify the person. Then Aleshnick said he met with him and got him to agree to stop taking all of the papers from that vending box without needing to press charges.
A local merchant will review its security camera footage to try and identify who took the newspapers Wednesday, according to Potter.
In the meantime, The Sentinel printed a replacement batch of newspapers to later be redistributed, Potter said. The Sentinel prints The Commons every week.
On Thursday afternoon, volunteers went to the newspaper’s Brattleboro office on Main Street and helped assemble the papers, which were then re-delivered, Potter said.
“The response has been pretty amazing and heartening,” he said.
Potter said he’s grateful for how The Commons’ readership responded and worked to quickly get this week’s edition out in Brattleboro again.
“We are blessed with this newspaper where our readers are more than consumers,” he said. “They really are advocates for what we do. They’re angry and they want to help.”
Matt Nanci can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1439, or mnanci@keenesentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter @MNanciKS.
That is brazen
How does someone take 300 newspapers out of the Co-op… in a shopping cart? No one noticde? No one said anything? With all the smart phones around, no one got a photo?
Here is how i see that aspect
As you all can imagine, I’ve been working on this affair since it broke.
The answer to SK-B’s question is quite simple (I wish they all were!):
Yes, i agree, it was brazen, especially given the extent of the rampage. But at the co-op and elsewhere, when it was noticed by personnel, they thought: “Hmmm, that’s strange, but i guess he’s doing what he’s supposed to be doing” and so they did not think much of it … until i called a short while later to check.
That’s very reasonable and i certainly cannot fault them. It easily could have been the case that i, or someone who i sent, had valid reason to take out a whole lot of papers for one distribution need or another. It’s actually happened in the past fairly often – take a pile out – albeit on a much smaller scale.
It did not particularly look like a theft, a crime, so no one would have thought to grab a photo of it in progress.
And, of course, no one at any one location knew that it recurred at 15 other locations around town.
b.
Hope Culprit is Caught
That’s disturbing news. We’re lucky to have two local newspapers, the last thing they need is people doing stuff like this. I remember hearing about a similar thing happening with Wisdom Magazine a few years back. They suspected this one guy from a competing publication, I think it was Many Hands, but I’m not sure what happened in the end.
The coop has a very comprehensive video camera system, which they use very effectively at catching shoplifters. I would hope they’d use their resources to help, at least to prevent any future incidents.
free papers are free
Can’t help note the irony of a newspaper, in 2015, bothered that all their papers were actually picked up. Most are concerned with lack of readership, and people not picking them up. : )
But yes, typically at the end of the week there’re many unread Commons sitting there around town, so having them all picked up, right away, is unusual.
The first thing I thought of was that maybe some folks needed paper for paper mache for a July 4th float, and picked up free newsprint in bulk. (I’ve also seen people grab a stack, not to read, but to wrap fish and lobsters, too. It’s a picnic weekend.)
As far as I’m aware, there is no crime in picking up a pile of free papers left out for the public to pick up for free. I can print something and put it out for people, but can’t dictate who picks it up or why.
This could be prevented by using locking, paid news boxes, of course. Charge for each issue!
... but stealing free papers is a crime
Good ideas, Chris.
Except:
There were several other free newspapers available at some of the locations where the Commons was swiped (and by “swiped”, i mean wiped out altogether, not just “many” taken for some other purpose. Every single one!) and none of those other free papers were taken. Rather, as far as we can tell, the perpetrator went directly to the Commons drop locations, and only to the Commons drop locations, along a long Brattleboro route stretching some 5 miles, and he took only Commons.
Doesn’t add up for paper mache-ing or fish-wrapping.
Secondly, it is indeed a crime. There are several documented legal cases of successful prosecutions of individuals having taken free newspapers in such a manner, and there are several organizations/legal firms working precisely on this aspect of the case. There was a real value of several thousand dollars in producing those papers for a specific purpose. That purpose was thwarted, and so there was a several thousand dollar loss incurred.
The purpose was to get the papers to the reading public. Whoever stole those papers seemed to have had malicious intent which resulted in depriving the public of their right to read the Commons.
I am not a lawyer (much to my mom’s chagrin :>), but i can assume that there are several instances of chargeable offenses in all of this.
Finally, yes, we can have locked boxes and charge for the paper, but that would be counter-productive to our desire to make the news available to all, and to all segments of our community regardless of their financial means. And it would be counter-productive to our belief that access to news and information, and the exchange of ideas in a community, is a basic right and should be treated as a public service, not a commodity. The commodification of the news and basing it on a bottom-line rather than the needs of the community is a major problem for journalism and the free press today. This is precisely what the Commons has been trying to counteract.
b.
Irony
Just a comment:
How would you feel if Hackers deleted your website?
Just askin’
A better example?
Hacking a website is clearly a violation because logging in someone else’s account without permission is fraud.
But what about a denial of service attack? There is no law against using a website. But if 100,000 users get on the site, it overwhelms the server, so that the website can no longer function. (Do I have that approximately right?) If a hacker is able to bring down a site by using bots to multiply what would otherwise have been normal use of the site: Isn’t that analogous to a single person taking multiple copies of The Commons in order to deny service to legitimate readers?
oh my it's obvious
it’s theft, plain and simple.
Latest Update
Editorial from this week’s “The Commons”
Putting the community into the community paper — Voices / Editorial commonsnews.org
Originally published in The Commons issue #313 (Wednesday, July 8, 2015). This story appeared on page A3
We hope that someday we can tell you the full story about why someone would take 1,500 copies of The Commons last week. Right now we have more questions than we do answers.
Thanks to two eyewitnesses and security footage at a third location, this we do know: as afternoon turned to evening on Wednesday, July 1, two people — a tall, dark-haired man with a “strong brow,” accompanied by a young boy — shadowed our distribution efforts. They removed from all our vending boxes and our major distribution points almost every single copy of the newspaper we delivered to Brattleboro.
But what followed was nothing other than an affirmation of the spark that created this newspaper and the values that have kept it going for almost 10 whole years.
Our printer is more than just a faceless vendor. The Keene Sentinel — one of those rare species, a family-owned daily — has been a true partner to us over the years. On Thursday morning, Tom Ewing, Rob Farnsworth, and their colleagues immediately made room in a busy holiday weekend printing schedule to get the paper back on press in record time and with nothing but cooperation, positive vibes, and good humor in the face of inconvenience to the extreme.
More than a dozen volunteers answered our call on Facebook and came to Brattleboro to assemble the multiple sections of the paper and then resupply our vending boxes and retail drop points. The swarm of energy let this gargantuan task take place in 45 minutes, and as a result, The Commons was once again on the street less than 24 hours from the time we discovered it gone.
A cadre of readers, on their own initiative, have made special donations that have completely covered the hundreds of dollars it cost to reprint the paper — an unanticipated expense our frugal operation is hard-pressed to absorb. Countless readers all over Windham County immediately began to keep an extra eye out on our remaining newspapers, extra attention that might well have discouraged a more expansive spree.
Multiple merchants are beginning to let us peruse security footage to help us in this mystery.
Robert Bertsche and Asya Calixto, attorneys at Prince Lobel Tye LLP who represent us as members of the New England Newspaper and Press Association, turned on a dime and made some persuasive legal arguments that one individual taking hundreds of newspapers is not logically equivalent to hundreds of individual readers enjoying their single respective copies.
And none of these feats would have been possible without the behind-the-scenes work of our indefatigable board president, Barry Aleshnick, who has managed the distribution of this newspaper from its first issue and who did his own shoe-leather reporting, sleuthing, and planning to figure out exactly which copies were taken, when they disappeared, and how we would replace them.
All told, this baffling stunt has cost our not-for-profit newspaper at least $2,500.
Yes, The Commons is free, but the wholesale theft of one-sixth of our press run robs a community of news, robs advertisers of value, and robs us of credibility and trust. That brazen act is as wrong as we are confident it is illegal.
So to all of you who have helped us get the news out there and try to find the person responsible, whether you lugged papers or shared it on social media, whether you chipped in or whether you called with a kind word, we so appreciate your help and your engagement in this, our own story.
You put the “community” in your community newspaper.
We have our lede. Now let’s see how the story ends.
—Jeff Potter, editor and operations director, for the staff of The Commons and the board of directors of Vermont Independent Media
P.S. We are happy to report that the Brattleboro Police Department is working with us on the matter, and we thank Chief Michael Fitzgerald and his colleagues for their attention.
Chuckle of the day
Steal a copy of this week’s “Commons”.
On the front page, look at the upper right corner, under the word: “FREE”.
Look for the (very) fine print.