Angry words are flying between the weekly Dakota Dunes/North Sioux City Times of Sioux City, S.D., and the local Republican party.
The GOP sent out a mailer just before Election Day with a faux nameplate that looked a lot like the local newspaper. The paper then felt compelled to run that mailer on page one with a disclaimer that it was not their product.
The Times’ sister paper, the Southern Union County Leader-Courier and Times of Elk Point reports this incident…
…raises the question whether the local Republican Party and its chairman believe in basic business principles like copyright and brand protection.
Former District 16 State Senator Mike Broderick (R) told the Times he initially thought the publication was the newspaper.
“The party should have known better than to do this,” said Broderick.
A call to Union County Republican chairman Dan Lederman requesting an explanation was not returned.
The Times awaits his apology.
It could be a long wait. Yankton Press & Dakotan staffer Derek Bartos today reports Lederman’s reply:
“I think [publisher] Bruce Odson thinks people are stupid, because if anybody reads the paper, they’ll see the title is completely different,” he said. “It’s a different name, it’s free and it has a full disclaimer on it that it was paid for by the Union County Republicans.”
…“The point wasn’t to make it look like it,” he said. “The point was to use a name that was synonymous with newspapers, which is Times. The name is different. It looks different. It has a different color for the name, and it has a different name altogether.”
Read more in the Yankton paper. Find the Leader-Courier‘s story here.
Find the AP version of this story here.
I can’t seem to find a circulation figure for the Dakota Dunes/North Sioux City Times. But average weekly circulation of the Leader-Courier and Times is cited as 1,383.
