Stop, Thief! How One Small Weekly Fights Newsrack Ripoffs

By: Mark Fitzgerald With just one driver servicing three dozen newsracks on the streets of its southeastern Alabama hometown, single-copy circulation operations at the Eufaula Tribune would seem hardly comparable to the metro dailies that each morning launch legions of vans from regional distribution centers.

But talk for a while with Editor Jack Smith, who co-owns and operates the twice-weekly paper with his father, Publisher Joel P. Smith, and you quickly recognize the connections. The Eufaula Tribune, circulation 5,500, shares at least one big single-copy problem with dailies in New York, Chicago, Detroit, or Houston: Newsrack theft and vandalism.

"For a number of years, we had three different problems," Smith said in a telephone interview. "We had people who would steal an entire newsrack, and take it into the woods and beat it to death until they could get the money out of it. Even if you did recover the rack, it was useless. Then we had racks being vandalized, and finally we had the people who were putting 50-cents in and taking five papers out."

Single-copy losses were adding up to "many thousands of dollars," Smith said, until the paper unleashed the kind of aggressive campaign against the thieves and vandals that even big-city dailies could emulate.

As with many other aspects of circulation management, turning around theft at the Eufaula Tribune started with measurement. Tribune managers knew the old rule of thumb that rack collections should add up to at least 80% of the expected take. But like a lot of small dailies, it hadn't ever actually measured its collections.

What the paper found wasn't good. "We were (collecting) in the low 70s for a while," Smith said.

And when the paper began measuring the collections from each individual box, it found some racks that were returning just 50% of the revenue that could be expected from the number of copies dropped off. As it would turn out, freeloaders had discovered that at some racks, a sharp blow to the side of the box with a simultaneous hard tug at the front opened it up for a free copy -- or a dozen free copies.

The Tribune attacked these thefts with the power of the press and the power of the police. It ran full-page ads in the style of Old West "Wanted" posters that promised a $100 cash reward for tips leading to the arrest and conviction of newspaper thieves or rack rustlers. The paper also put the full-court press on authorities to get them to pay attention to the problem.

That took a little bit of persistence. "Once we told the police chief how many thousands of dollars a year we were losing, he listened," Smith said. But the chief also insisted the paper check collections to ensure the thefts weren't an inside job.

Soon after the ads began running, the paper caught a break when a when was caught on a convenience store surveillance camera stealing a newsrack. The damage to the rack qualified the crime as a felony. The man ended up getting a year in county jail, and a lot of exposure in the Eufaula Tribune.

"We gave him a lot of press," Smith said, "and we started to put 'racks under surveillance' in the ads."

Not long ago, the paper's circulation driver saw a man he happened to know breaking into a rack. Charged with two misdemeanors, third-degree criminal mischief and third-degree theft of property, the man was fined more than $1,000, and the employee collected the $100 reward.

The Tribune has taken some defensive measures, too, such as installing sleeves in some machines that make it difficult to snatch multiple copies at a time.

The efforts are now paying off, Smith said: "Our collections have increased from the low 70's to around 80%, and in one recent week we collected over 90% percent. We think it's been a combination of the police helping us out, and a lot of publicity."

That publicity is continuing, and changing in form so that it doesn't become stale, Smith said. "We're constantly putting out the message that newspaper theft is no different from walking into a Wal-Mart, sticking a Game Boy [video game] into your pants, and walking out," he said. "We've tried to make the public aware that this is a crime."