Mercury News Caught With Independent Media News Racks

A key piece of evidence has disappeared in the San Jose Mercury News rack theft caper.

Last week, San Jose police were called to the newspaper’s headquarters after an independent distribution firm discovered its news racks—along with those of more than a dozen other local publications—in a metal recycling dumpster behind the daily’s plant.

The recycling container, about the dimensions of a mid-sized moving van’s cargo area, was mostly full, and more news boxes were stacked around the dumpster. The operation to round up and destroy racks apparently targeted the distribution channels of competitors to San Ramon–based Bay Area News Group (BANG), which owns daily newspapers from Marin to Monterey, including the Mercury News, and community weeklies in Silicon Valley.

“We’d been losing at least three a week,” said Tom Lilledahl, of Mountain View–based Circulation Management Inc. After racks disappeared on Willow Glen’s Lincoln Avenue and The Alameda in San Jose, CMI personnel went to the Mercury News’ Ridder Park Drive plant and found its missing property, along with news boxes of Metro, the Palo Alto Daily Post, the Mountain View Voice, Good Times, La Oferta, the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.

When shocked representatives of Metro, the Palo Alto Daily Post and CMI showed up at the Ridder Park Drive plant to reclaim their property, San Jose police officers and Mercury News security personnel ordered them to wait on the sidewalk. The Daily Post‘s publisher was reportedly threatened with arrest when he went to recover a rack.

The situation was defused after SJPD offered to take a report and document the evidence, and a Mercury News executive agreed to remove the racks from the dumpster, count and organize the racks and allow the publications to recover their property the next day.

The Merc did not keep the agreement, however.

On Thursday, it asked for more time to empty the dumpster and offered to deliver the seized racks rather than have publishers pick them up. On Friday, the Mercury News showed up with only four of the five Metro racks that it had in its possession.

Where’s Rack # 5?

At least one news rack in the Merc‘s possession vanished as the San Jose Police Department prepared to commence a criminal investigation into the daily’s dumping of its competitors’ racks.

Mercury News executives offered no explanation for the evidence tampering—only that they had “triple checked” the yard and can’t locate it. Without the missing box—a months-old, recently-redesigned Metro news rack—it will be harder to unravel the mystery and trace whether the Mercury‘s sweep of competitors’ stands was centered mainly in Palo Alto or if the media giant was also behind the recent disappearances of street distribution boxes in San Jose, which were reported by three organizations.

• • A
  • A
  • A
• 0 Comments