For the most part, I believe competition among businesses is good, especially for the consumer. It can make a business that once took no pride in its products improve its quality and service. It can also bring prices down as businesses fight for customers.
Competition makes businesses “up their games.”
But competition has an ugly side. A side that causes people to twist facts, maybe even to the point of lying, in order to try to beat a competitor — a side that makes desperate people do despicable things.
Such is the case with our competitor, The Lake Today, a small, free newspaper put together and managed out of Jefferson City that has been in existence for three years and whose management is, evidently, desperate enough to harass our drivers with a private investigator and local police officer (who is one and the same person), place its newspapers on top of our products in our own rack space, plagiarize our products and print stories about us that are patently untrue. There is competition and there is bullying. Jefferson City is trying to bully its way into our market.
I am very reluctant to bring this situation out in public. In fact, at first, I was not going to. It felt that making the situation public would be lowering ourselves and our journalistic standards to an unacceptable level. However, this organization and its employees have had their integrities questioned. I have had subscribers threaten to unsubscribe because of this. I’ve deduced that I have to set the record straight.
For those of you who don’t read The Lake Today, I’ll fill you in on what happened. Last week, on the front page of the newspaper, The Lake Today reported that its parent company, Central Missouri Newspapers Inc., filed a civil suit against our parent company GateHouse Media Missouri, for throwing out its newspapers. The Lake Today claimed that it hired a private investigator who verified this. The suit demanded that we stop removing their newspapers. In short, the story and their general manager Mike Vivian out of Jefferson City said we were systematically removing and disposing their newspapers around the lake area.
Before I get into the details of this nonsense, let me state, for the record, that the story and the reason for the suit are all a vicious lie, untrue and a desperate attempt to attack our integrity. We simply do not go around throwing out competitor’s products.
So how and why can they put such a complete fabrication on their front page? I don’t know. They always are saying that Elvis is still alive in The National Enquirer. I guess they think people will believe anything.
All I can do is explain our side of things and hope that people believe us — because we were as shocked and surprised by this as anyone.
In the world of giveaway newspapers and magazines (typically you see these racks in the front of a store as you walk out), there is usually one rack in which a number of different publications are placed. Each slot or space on a rack is taken by a publication. Drivers know to put the publication they are delivering on a particular rack or slot. Unless a publication stops delivering to the rack, the papers go in the same spot week after week (I know, more information than you ever cared to know about free papers).
Here is the truth: We will remove any product that is in our rack space that isn’t ours. It doesn’t happen a lot because publications usually keep to their own spaces. However, when it does happen, and it has happened a few times with The Lake Today, we move the product out of our slot and into an open one or somewhere nearby. We make no apologies for this. Having someone put a publication on top of ours affects our readership. If a new bank came to town, I’m pretty sure a bank already established would not allow the new bank to set up shop in its lobby. The same goes for us. We’re not going to allow a competitor to occupy the space where we have traditionally placed our newspapers and have the right to use.
But we also don’t go around throwing out competitor’s newspapers.
This all stems from one rack in one grocery store in which The Lake Today has continually used our space. Traditionally, we have shared this rack with Denny Benne Media, who have one side of the rack, while we have the other. Evidently, someone at Denny Benne Media gave The Lake Today permission to use its side of the rack. However, instead of using Benne Media’s side, the side they had permission to use, The Lake Today chose to use ours. We asked them not to use our side and moved (and continue to move) The Lake Today’s products to the Benne Media side of the rack. To this day, The Lake Today continues to use our side, and we continue to move it over.
Sound silly? That’s because it is. But wait, it gets sillier.
Evidently, The Lake Today felt so strongly that it had a right to our side of the rack that it hired a private investigation firm. They, in turn, contacted Lake Ozark police officer Bill Edburg — who also happens to moonlight as a private investigator for the firm — to catch our driver moving papers over to the other side of the rack or worse, throwing out papers all over the lake.
According to The Lake Today story, a private investigator had tipped Edburg off, and he investigated in his duty as a police officer. That’s a bit misleading, the private investigating firm called its part-time worker: Bill Edburg. Edburg then responded to his employer’s (the private investigating firm) request by investigating the matter as an employee of the Lake Ozark Police Department. That seems a bit of a conflict of interest to me.
According to the police report that was filed, Edburg never actually saw our driver take newspapers. He did, however, see our driver move the papers over to the other side of a rack, something which we did due to The Lake Today’s placement of its papers on our side of the rack. We didn’t, and there was no evidence or observation of, throw out The Lake Today products.
Without any evidence of stealing, Edburg did his best (or worst, as the case may be) to make our guy talk.
According to our driver (who is a very nice man), Edburg, with his gun holstered at his side, pulled him into an unmarked car, flashed a badge, ran his driver’s license through the system for any priors and told our driver that if he didn’t tell the truth, he was going to place him under arrest and embarrass him and our company.
Our poor driver truthfully told him that he never threw out any papers and that he was simply moving them out of our spot and onto Benne Media’s. Our driver told him he didn’t have a directive from me to throw out The Lake Today’s newspapers. As you can imagine, when he came the office, our driver was pretty upset from the experience.
In its story, The Lake Today claimed Edburg saw our driver take The Lake Today newspapers out to his van. I’d like to see the proof of that. The reality is, our driver was taking back our old newspapers from the previous week that hadn’t been picked up. He does this every time he visits a rack. But Edburg didn’t look in the van or do anything to verify what papers the driver was carrying out. He was too busy trying to get our driver to confess to something he wasn’t doing.
The Lake Today tried to press criminal charges, and those actions were thrown out quickly because the charges were nonsense (you can look it up). I cannot imagine what proof it plans to have in connection with the civil suit it filed. Although I do not know the motivation of The Lake Today in filing a suit that has no merit and no basis in fact, we all know that once you put an accusation “out there,” the truth of the underlying facts gets lost and the accusation tends to be taken as the truth.
While we are reviewing our legal options about the harassment our driver received and the unfair defamation our business incurred, the damage has been done, and undoubtedly, some folks think we have been unethically throwing out the newspapers of our competitor.
In the past three years, we’ve tolerated a lot from The Lake Today. We’ve never squawked about the repeated times they placed their products on top of ours (ironic I know). We didn’t tell our readers that their sports reporter plagiarized our stories, or that they’ve tried to hire many of our employees away from us (no one has left thus far), and that they scared the heck out of an innocent guy trying to do his job.
As all of this occurred, I kept chalking it up to “competition.” But with the fabricated story The Lake Today placed on its front page, this isn’t good ol’, fair American-style competition. It’s lying and bullying, and it’s time the community know about it.
John Tucker is the publisher of the Lake Sun and Lake Media. Contact him at john.tucker@lakesunonline.com.
