Stupid newspaper tricks

Foster's Daily Democrat
333 Central Ave.
Dover, NH 03820

Dear Foster's:

Thank you for coming up with your brilliant marketing technique of giving free one week trial home delivery subscriptions to unsuspecting homeowners who may or may not be in town that week. This makes our jobs much easier.

--The burglars of the Seacoast region

This week several houses on my street, including mine, were "lucky" recipients of the aforementioned trial subscription from the local fishwrap, Foster's Daily Democrat [sic].

Now Dover is not Miami, so I can understand why it would take them a minute (as opposed to five seconds) to realize why this is a bad idea. But they do publish police blotter columns, and some fraction of the crimes reported therein are burglaries. What better way to let burglars know who is out of town than to let newspapers pile up at a house whose owner didn't know they would be piling up?

Oh, and another piece of free advice to Foster's: Don't give free advertising to the competition. Their papers are delivered in plastic bags which advertize home subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal. It just so happens that the Wall Street Journal's parent company owns the other daily newspaper in the Seacoast region, the Portsmouth Herald.