Rack Attack: Why the city is moving in on newspaper boxes.

Is it possible that this city's newspaper reporters hate the mayor so much, they've actually stopped listening to him? Take last week, for instance. In announcing the city's new billion-dollar plan to sell the franchising rights to New York's so-called "street furniture"?trash cans, bus shelters, pay toilets, what have you?Mayor Bloomberg mumbled out a sentence that should have caused every newspaper reporter in the city to start speed-dialing his editor:

"Our sidewalks," Mayor Mike said, "will have new bus-stop shelters, and the resolution also allows for the introduction of new trash cans, information kiosks, public rest rooms and news racks that will generate millions of dollars in needed revenue for the city."

News racks? What news racks?

After all, the newspapers in this city already have their own news racks. If you're reading a hard copy of this newspaper, you've probably just used one. The Times, the News and the Post (who reported that quote, incidentally), the Voice, us and dozens of others keep and maintain their own news racks on the city streets. And not only do we have them, but we've recently been forced to accept a series of complex and potentially very expensive city-mandated rules for their upkeep. But more on that later.

If we all have our own distribution racks, and have no plans to abandon them, why is the mayor planning on bidding out a massive contract to construct new ones?

Elisabeth de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation (which would handle the "street furniture" bid), answered in vague terms when asked what the mayor was talking about. For instance, which racks did the mayor have in mind, and where would they be?

"Well, they don't exist yet," she said. "But they would be in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic."

But aren't there already racks in such areas?

"Are you asking," she said, catching on, "if our racks are going to replace your racks?"

That was the idea.

"I'll get back to you," she said, then never did.

Every now and then in New York, one will come across a small, seemingly unimportant story that leads straight into the mouth of a Big Scandalous Story, one that unmasks the city leadership at its ugliest. The fight over the city's newspaper racks is exactly that kind of story. News racks? Who cares, aside from a sweaty circulation manager or two?

But a close look at the rack issue leads straight into the backroom deals that birthed the street furniture initiative, one of the largest city contracts ever (the Voice called it the largest ever), and the clearest example yet of the forcible-protection-racket style of government that has become the hallmark of the Bloomberg administration.

The news rack issue is the kind of thing that probably won't interest you all that much if you don't happen to work in the newspaper business. But since it's a prerequisite for the rest of the story, here's a brief summary of the particulars.

Last year at about this time, city councilwoman Eva Moskowitz?a creature of the Upper East Side who looks like the owner of at least two Ann Taylor Hosiery Club memberships?managed to pass into law a series of new regulations governing the use and placement of news racks, both those of free papers like ours and for-sale papers like the Times.

The law was intended to bring some order into a chaotic news rack situation that had, admittedly, grown somewhat out of control in recent years with the proliferation of new publications. The sheer numbers of new boxes on the streets made it inevitable that in some places, a News or Voice or Press rack would be moved and inadvertently block a crosswalk or bus stop, or become covered with unsightly graffiti, or simply break, spilling garbage and broken rack doors onto the street.

That a degree of order had to be brought to this situation is something few even in the industry would argue with. It's the form the new rules took and the way they're now being enforced that's infuriating.

There are some 35 new regulations under the new rules, governing everything from the appearance of the box (no graffiti or stickers), size of the box (no taller than 50 inches, no wider than 24), to the use of advertising on the box (banned). Violation of any one of these or any of the other rules is a fineable offense, with penalties ranging from $100 to $500. The city also reserves the right to impound "scofflaw" racks, or remove all of a repeat-offending company's racks for three months.

Companies were allowed a grace period, until this past April, to comply. After that, the citations started piling up. Here at New York Press, we received dozens within a few weeks; Press circulation manager, John Baxter has a pile of citations two inches high. Some were by the book, while others were just plain crazy: Racks for our new sports paper, New York Sports Express, were cited for being dirty less than a week after they were dropped?brand new and gleaming spotless orange?on the street.

Other publications report similar problems. Andre Becker of the Gotham Writers' Workshop says that his racks were cited for not having the paper's address and telephone on the box, even though they all do. And there were other irritating inconsistencies.

"For instance," he said, "Some kid would put a sticker on the front of the rack, and the DOT would come around and put an even bigger sticker on it, with a notice that says, 'You're stickered!' And their stickers are impossible to get off."

A number of circulation managers noted angrily that while newspaper companies are now subject to punishment for the presence of graffiti on their property, other types of public objects?payphones, bus shelters and particularly the grates protecting storefronts?can be plastered with graffiti without garnering a public response.

"I've never seen a store grate without graffiti," said our own Baxter. "But if some kid hits us in the middle of the night after we clean our rack, we get a summons. It's going to be very hard to avoid getting cited."

There have been whispers among some circulation managers that the racks belonging to the for-pay papers like the Times and the Post have been suspiciously free of citation stickers, although Peter Donohue of USA Today says his company has received between 15 and 20 citations already (accounting for roughly 20 percent of the company's racks). But even assuming an equitable distribution of citations, the fact remains that once the fines kick in, it may be harder for the smaller organizations to maintain the bottom line.

Which may be the idea. City officials have dropped hints here and there indicating that the real targets of the new regulations are the smaller papers and the catalogues, whose quickly replicating numbers have inspired Moskowitz to continually refer to the streets as the "Wild West." Last year, DOT spokesman Tom Cocola put the matter plainly:

"Our problem was never with the major newspapers," Cocola said. "Our problem was with the guy with the dot-com who wanted to advertise it, and magically a little box appeared on Houston St."

So the big papers are okay, but the little guy with the little paper is a nuisance?

Sounds like a First Amendment issue. But that's just an appetizer.

Even before the mayor made his "news rack" comment in his street furniture announcement, some of us in the newspaper world suspected something was up behind the scenes. It didn't take a genius to guess what that might be. Around the country, the winds everywhere seem to be blowing in the same direction.

From San Francisco to Chicago to Atlanta, a new phenomenon is quietly (in some cases, loudly) creeping into the newspaper distribution business. The old system of on-street individual racks?which themselves replaced the human on-street hawker?is being replaced by the so-called "pedmount," the large multi-rack containing a dozen or more papers.

The way the system works is this: The city eliminates the old racks by fiat, then bids out a contract to a private company to build and maintain the new "pedmount" multi-racks. As a cost-saving measure, the cities have allowed the companies to use the space on the back of these racks to place advertisements, the revenue from which pays for the maintenance of the structures.

This development has been an outrage to newspaper publishers for a number of reasons. It goes without saying that a newspaper's ability to draw up its own unique distribution strategy is central to any newspaper's commercial identity. But if every paper can only be where 12 other papers are, that tends to limit most publications to the more affluent high-traffic areas, and eliminate most methods of target distribution. There is also a public interest issue here. Those people who live in areas without enough traffic or business to support a variety of publications might find themselves without any easy access to the press.

Moreover, the inability to advertise one's publication on the outside of the rack seriously inhibits circulation. In New York, where there are a few pedmounts already in existence (particularly in the 42nd St. area), some companies have noticed a drastic drop-off in their paper's circulation when they share a rack with other papers.

"I'd say people probably buy 50 percent fewer papers when they're not in our own rack, with our own advertising on the outside," says Donohue of USA Today. "We tried [using the pedmounts], but it just didn't work out."

An even larger issue with the pedmounts involves the surrender of autonomy to another company, which is usually a corporate monster of a particular type. In San Francisco, the winning pedmount contractor is owned by Clear Channel, that bogeyman of the media landscape, which earlier this year was caught sponsoring pro-war rallies through its radio stations. Another big player in the news rack game is the French company JCDecaux, a multinational giant with excellent political connections in American cities.

Thus the introduction of pedmounts makes it possible that newspapers would have to submit to being put under the control of a pseudo-monopoly like Clear Channel, which would then be free to place its own advertising on the backs of the racks without compensating the paper. This is not unlike taking an over-the-air television station off the airwaves, forcing it onto Time-Warner cable, then granting Time-Warner a percentage of the channel's air-time to sell its own commercials.

And indeed, this is exactly the situation that has unfolded in numerous cities, inspiring a number of lawsuits. A San Francisco suit brought by a coalition of papers failed to defeat pedmounts, while in Atlanta a federal judge ruled in favor of the newspapers, calling the city mandated Coca-Cola ads on the back of airport multi-racks a First Amendment violation.

Is New York headed for a similar scenario? One of the strongest advocates for the new news-rack regulations has been the Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS), which incidentally served on the city's design advisory board for the original Request for Proposals of the street furniture bill. The MAS considers the news racks such a public menace, in fact, that it has a form on the front page of its website that allows citizens to make complaints about individual boxes.

Six years ago, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett?who appears to be the only reporter in this city with even mild interest in the implications of the street furniture bid?reported that the MAS had solicited a $20,000 donation from?JCDecaux. It had also discussed donations with Adshel, whose parent company is Clear Channel. MAS president Brendan Sexton was forced to step down as a result of the revelations.

Even today, the MAS remains connected to pedmount companies. Sitting on its Board of Directors is one Elizabeth Berger, the Senior Government Relations Advisor for the Law Office of Claudia Wagner. Wagner is currently the chief lobbyist for Clear Channel in New York. Sexton, incidentally, remains on the MAS board.

The idea that the city would essentially confiscate the property of dozens of newspapers and hand them over to a Decaux or a Clear Channel for a fee isn't unthinkable. Just ask the folks from a different industry, the city's newsstand operators. Just last week, lobbyists for the industry narrowly headed off a proposed Bloomberg measure that would have forced newsstand owners to destroy their own structures at their own expense, rebuild them (again at their own expense) according to the design of the street furniture bid-winner, and then accept that company's advertising on the back of their new stands without being compensated at all.

"The new construction would be estimated to cost about $45,000, and the operators would have to pay for it," said Robert Bookman, who represents the Newsstand Operators Association. "They'd have to accept all the costs, and get none of the advertising. It's outrageous."

It's worth noting that newsstand operators, like the owners of news racks, are currently prohibited from using their structures to post advertising. Indeed, advertising anything but one's own newspaper or website on the housing of a news rack is one of the many fineable offenses under the new rules. But the street furniture bid formally puts an end to city squeamishness over sidewalk advertising. Coincidentally, this change of heart will come as soon as the city takes control of the advertising space.

Also worth noting is that the street furniture bid idea has been in the works for a decade or more?long before the current budget crisis. But now that that crisis is here, the plan offers an easy solution to the cash crunch: Seize everything that's out in the open, turn it over to a White Knight (Clear Channel, JCDecaux), then sit back and watch as they plaster the whole city with ads for the Gap and Pepsi and the next shitty Julia Roberts movies. If a few businesses die, or there are a few free-speech casualties along the way, so what? Times are tough.

As for the news racks, we're preparing for the future of pedmounts.

"Yeah, that's clearly what they have in mind for you," said Bookman, about the introduction of city-run multi-racks. "I think it's more than a possibility. I think it's likely."