A 'do not deliver' list for weekly newspapers? Works for me

A 'do not deliver' list for those free newspapers that litter driveways and apartment lobbies? That's what one fed-up Maryland woman is proposing:

Connie Finch doesn't read a newspaper, but she picks up plenty each morning. At least one free newspaper is dropped at the end of her driveway each day, and she picks up more newspapers left by her neighbors.

All of them end up in the garbage.

"We're not asking for it," Finch said. "And it's just littering our streets."

Complaints from the Westminster resident Finch and others about free home-delivery newspapers in Maryland have inspired State Del. Tanya Shewell to propose a "Do Not Deliver" registry that would work similarly to the "Do Not Call" registry for telemarketers. If approved, would be the first of its kind in the nation.

Naturally, newspaper publishers are tremendously sympathetic to Ms. Finch...just not sympathetic enough to actually do anything about it:

"My desire for the newspaper to not go to those who don't want it far exceeds their desire to stop getting it. ... I hate it when we annoy readers, and keeping that annoyance to a minimum is among my highest priorities," said Michael Phelps, CEO of Clarity Media Group's Baltimore-Washington Examiner Newspaper Group.

The newspaper industry is fighting the proposed registry, saying it isn't needed.

"Nobody wants to send out papers that are wasted, that people just throw away," said Jack Murphy, executive director of the Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Press Association.

Of course they do, because they're not newspapers at all; they're advertising vehicles, with recipes and week-old community features gluing them together into a simulacrum of a weekly paper. And the ads are sold on a circulation-number basis, not on the actual number of eyeballs that actually look at the thing before it heads to the recycle bin or the trash.

I hate legal solutions to problems that could be solved with a little common sense and courtesy, but I hate this waste more. And if Ms. Finch can make headway on this, I'll take up a collection for her to attack an even bigger pestilence: stacks of unwanted telephone books from no-name companies.

Comments

[Rabbit]

Sign me up, Ms. Finch. Twice a week I get a free local fishwrap that's some 40 pages, but if you condense all the real news, it would fill three.

I might not even mind so much if they actually got it ON the driveway, but I live in the country, and have a ditch and culvert. Three-quarters of the papers land in the ditch (the delivery guy throws them out of his car window as he drives by), right into the puddle of water that collects there.

My neighbor has a circular driveway, and he gets a paper thrown into each end. The delivery guy apparently can't figure out that both ends belong to the same house.

[Lizzy]

Up here in Portland a journalist I know calls them "porch spam" and has been asking the very same questions.

I'm all for regulating them. I did call up my local paper and contacted them directly, telling them very clearly telling if they dumped newspapers in my bushes again (they loved to miss my porch for some reason) I would not only file a nuisance complaint against them with the city for trespassing and littering, I would mobilize others as well. Although they told me "there was nothing they could do" for some reason the papers stopped coming. At one point there was also talk for a "newspaper drive" where people save them up (plastic bags and all) and then rent a truck (a weekly newspaper wanted to sponsor it) and then we would dump them en-masse back at the newspapers headquarters.

Also, can we add phone books to this list? Those 20 pound door stops have been sitting on my porch since November.

[Chris]

Amen to that. And speaking of which four (still in plastic) phone books are at the end of my apartment landing, by the time they got to the third floor they were too lazy to drop one at every door and just left them at the end of the hallway, where undoubtedly I'll have to take and drop them in the recycle bin as otherwise they'll rot there.

[Donna]

RIGHT ON!!! I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia and this issue is a nightmare! This is not only an environmental waste but a threat to the security of homeowners. It raises the red flag that no one is home and aids vandalism, theft and robbery.

[Alex Ireland]

Great tip Kevin. You can sign up (for free) to opt out from getting telephone books dropped on your front porch at www.YellowPagesGoesGreen.org

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