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The Mirror's newspaper boxes: how a marketing coup became a pain in the ass

In 1970, a full 16 years before the Mirror was founded, Mayor Jean Drapeau decided to screw over his critics with the city's newspapers. He banned coin-operated newspaper boxes on streetcorners, for the simple reason that he considered them an "eyesore."

While other area municipalities like Westmount welcomed the boxes, the streets of Montreal became a coin-box-free-zone. It stayed that way for 20 years until 1990, when the Mirror figured out a way to tiptoe around Drapeau's bylaw. It was a good idea at the time, though it didn't work out quite as planned.

The plan: Drapeau's bylaw forbade newspaper boxes on public property--but not on private property. So then-Mirror distribution manager Lubin Bisson started cutting deals with merchants in key locations to put a box at the edge of their property line. To keep the insurers happy, he bolted all the boxes to the ground himself (with the help of then-publisher Cathy Salisbury). The Mirror purchased 30 brand-spanking-new boxes at a cost of $122 apiece and promoted the hell out of them, running corny photos of Mirror boxes against the city skyline and stuff like that.

The pro: When they first appeared, the boxes were like billboards, only better, anchoring the Mirror's logo on key city streetcorners. Added bonus: in addition to branding the city's streets, the boxes featured the added functionality of actually distributing papers. "We had a box at Pine and St-Laurent right beside the old newsstand," says Bisson. "We could never keep enough copies in it. But even if it was empty, everyone who walked by saw the Mirror logo." It didn't take rival Voir more than three months to come up with boxes of their own.

The con: Montrealers, unaccustomed to the newspaper boxes' presence, took to them like apes to a monolith. Some threw their trash in them. Others plastered them with posters. People kicked them, jumped on them, even pissed in them. They'd open the door and sit on it like it was a chair. And they routinely set fire to them, which explains why you can't actually see through the window of most Mirror boxes--the plexiglas is melted on the inside. The fact that the Mirror is free only made things worse. After all, many people would love to set fire to a Gazette box, but would they bother paying 75 cents to do so?

--Philip Preville