Wednesday, April 30, 2008

It was News to us



In an effort to "spruce up" the eighth floor, where the city hall cafeteria used to be, city employees last Thursday got rid of all the wire newspaper racks that were neatly lined against the west wall and replaced them with a new, city-owned wooden rack that will now "serve" all newspapers that are delivered to City Hall.

Now, unless you work at City Hall, this has little impact on your life. But what struck our us was how they did it without contacting any of the newspapers that own the racks on the eighth floor. Nobody at any of the news organizations we contacted was told anything of the switch. It was not until today that we even found out about the switch when we delivered this week's hard copy edition to City Hall — or the fact that every one of last week's papers were pitched in the trash to make room.

The city has tried to convince newspapers to go along with its plans to build large uniform newspaper dispensers all over town in the past with little success. That effort by the Barnes administration was the driving force for area newspapers to form the Newsrack Ordinance Committee, a committee of newspaper Publishers and Circulation Managers that would essentially police our own racks instead of cow-towing to the whims of a city government run amok, trying to get campaign dollars from big property management companies downtown! Ahem.

Looks like they are looking for those sneaky little victories where they can get them.

1 comment:

Cranky Puppy said...

Maybe they could tackle some more important things first, like the dumpster sitting in front of the apartments at 3220 E 10th that's been there more than a year in violation of the city's ordinances. Just a thought.