Free newspapers

[Stinky The Clown]

Each day there is one or another free newspaper thrown on our lawns. Calls to the county have met with sympathy but cries of no legal ability to do anything about it. The county exec is the kind of guy who I suspect would do something if he could. I have spoken to his chief of staff several times. We even looked into stopping them on the basis of littering laws. Even that was not possible. Calls to the offending publication asking they stop are as effective as a fart in a windstorm.

One paper is a mostly harmless local weekly. The other is a free (more hard) news paper with a decided right wing slant.

http://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/

Has anyone else had this problem? Has anyone else actually been able to make the "littering" stop?

I saw a nearby house with a big hand painted sign that said "NO 'FREE' NEWSPAPERS" and some plastic sleeved free newspapers on the lawn.

[Wickerman]

1. Crack open the thing

copy down a dozen or so advertisers and fire them off letters explaining why you have do desire to do business with them while they advertise in the free paper that is given to you against your will. Mention the sign down the street. Suggest the circulation numbers they are given as inticement for their tight advertsing dollars might just be padded.

CC: the publisher of the rag.

Wash your hands.

:shrug: worht a shot.

[ColbertWatcher]

9. That's beautiful! n/t

[Realityhack]

14. +1 n/t

[roguevalley]

15. I get an aryan nation newspaper about once every ten years or

so thrown by ??? onto my driveway. Nice kindling, aryan newspapers.

[Warpy]

2. My dad tried to stop newspaper delivery the year before he died.

A year later, they showed up on the front lawn every single morning. He complained bitterly that he'd called to cancel a dozen times and wasn't being billed but he was thoroughly sick of picking the damned things up every morning and that they made the recycling bin heavy every week.

He, too, looked into littering laws.

He was told by the town to be glad he was getting something for nothing.

He felt your pain.

[Sherman A1]

3. A couple of ideas

one, would be to take a large collection of them to the newspaper office and dump them on their doorstep(s).

two, just recycle them.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. My current tactic is to leave them where they lie until Tuesday night

Tuesday night, the recycling barrel goes out. They get dumped there.

[seabeyond]

4. our local was throwing in our yard. i dont read papers. hands turn black.

people would come to my house and hand it to me to be nice. i threw back to the sidewalk. called newspaper and told them to come by, pick up, and throw in trash, not my job or i would get them for litering and throw it in the street

they stopped delivering and picked up the papers. stack of them

[JohnnyRingo]

6. Wow! ... I've never heard of such a practice

That's never happened here in Ohio
I don't blame your outrage. It's really lazy to pitch them in your yard.

After some thought, here in NE Ohio, we wouldn't find them until March anyway. That's probably why we don't get them delivered like that.

[we can do it]

12. Are you kidding?

Stow, Tallmadge, Cuyahoga Falls, West Akron all get the crap weekly - sometimes two or three days past the days they are supposed to arrive.

[zagging]

7. If they have no legal ability to stop it

Collect them all from your neighbors and dump them on the front lawn of what you would consider the...ahem...controlling legal authority.

[madinmaryland]

8. They are dumping that crappy paper all over Howard County here.

I won't even touch it. I don't my the local weekly paper we get. It has a lot of school information which is relevant since my daughter is in school and my wife works in the school system.

[Stinky The Clown]

13. I, too, am in Howard County

I am sure we're talking about the same two papers. The Examiner and The View.

The Examiner is right wing fish wrap. The View is innocuous, albeit annoying.

Wapo shows up every few months but always stops within a week or two.

I have been in touch with Ulman's Chief of Staff on many occasions (a while ago). The papers stopped for a while, but are now back. They really did try, though. They called the publisher, they saber rattled, they looked into the litter thing with the county solicitor. I believe them when they said there was nothing they could do.

Are you in EC? Col? WF? .... ?

[madinmaryland]

16. Yeah. The examiner is a rag. The baltimore tv stations did a segment

about their spamming of yards with that crap a couple of years ago. Not much has changed, though.

WaPo starting delivering to previous place and delivered it free for a couple of years until we moved.

The free paper is the Columbia Flyer. What's the view? We're in col & u?

[Bucky]

10. Do you have a gun? I've found that a small stack of dead newsboys dissuades further distribution.

More experienced delivery boys know which houses to avoid just by spotting the circling vultures over the "troubled" lawns. ;)

[ColbertWatcher]

11. Find out which city or county agency is supposed to oversee this distribution, then ...

... collect them for week (and from your neighbors) and deliver them to the office of that agency.