Story Archive

Destined to Lose This One

Joseph Talbot, 43, was arrested by troopers in upstate New York and charged with drunk driving, as well as misdemeanor obstruction of governmental administration for refusing to be fingerprinted or photographed because he didn’t want his mug shot in that “rag of a newspaper” — the local Times of Wayne County. “We print all arrests in the county and all mug shots and have for the last 28 years,” says publisher and editor Ron Holdraker. “Everybody knows that.” He managed to get Talbot’s mug shot from the county jail, and indeed included it in the newspaper. Talbot, a banker from Newark, purchased at least 900 copies of that edition, at $1.25 each, in an attempt to get them off the street, Holdraker says. It didn’t help: not only does the paper have a 12,000 circulation, but when Times sales outlets called to report Talbot had bought all of their papers, Holdraker simply restocked them. When he ran out of extra copies, he put the story on his web site. “It wasn’t gonna be” online, Holdraker says, “but obviously he pushed it.” (RC/Times of Wayne County, Washington Post) ...Never argue with someone who buys bandwidth by the gigabyte.