Hilarious Small-Town Newspaper Rivalry Ends in Arrest
Mount Kisco ain't big enough for the two of them.
A rivalry between two community papers in the small town of Mount Kisco (pop. 10,994) escalated this weekend when one had a distributor for the other arrested, all thanks to a private eye.
The distributor, Michael Espinoza, was arrested for slipping copies of his paper, the Hudson Valley Reporter, into the display box of a rival paper, the Examiner — according to the Mount Kisco Daily Voice (and let's not rule out the Daily Voice masterminding the whole thing. "They will eliminate each other and the ad dollars will be ours," the editor probably cackled, punctuating his words with the stab of a red pen. "All the paid obituaries. OURS.")
Adam Stone, the Examiner's publisher, hired the private investigator who caught Espinoza on film. He has been charged with criminal tampering thanks to a restraining order the Examiner obtained, barring employees of the Hudson Valley Reporter from interfering in "any way with (the Examiner’s) green publication distribution boxes."
“Newspaper people are supposed to at least try to hold themselves to a higher standard,” Stone said. “To engage in such low-class behavior seems to contradict everything most people in local community journalism try to be about.”
Stone just wishes he could have caught the Hudson Valley Reporter scoundrels sooner.
“If we knew when it was happening and could send a private investigator at the right time, it clearly wasn’t an isolated incident,” Stone told the Daily Voice. “This has been happening for the last three weeks.”
