Newspaper & Mailroom

GateHouse Media Responds to New York Times Counterclaims

Monday 19. January 2009 - GateHouse Media, Inc. (BULLETIN BOARD: GHSE) announced that today, The New York Times Company filed its Answer to GateHouse's Complaint in the action GateHouse Media Massachusetts I, Inc. v. The New York Times Co., in federal district court in Boston.

GateHouse’s lawsuit challenges the repeated conduct of defendant’s boston.com since November 2008 in copying and displaying verbatim on boston.com’s “YourTown” websites for the Boston suburbs of Needham, Newton and Waltham headlines and leading sentences from news articles taken from GateHouse’s local newspapers and its hyper-local websites for each of those towns at WickedLocal.com. Boston.com has reproduced this information without GateHouse’s authorization or consent, and has done so in a manner which confuses the public as to the original source of the information by passing off GateHouse’s original content as its own and which completely relies on the expertise, experience, efforts, expenditures and resources of GateHouse. This is both copyright and trademark infringement, as well as unfair competition.

Incredibly, The New York Times now claims that certain of GateHouse’s own practices somehow qualify as copyright infringement. These in no way involve the predatory practice of copying a competitor’s content on a daily basis to be offered as a substitute product to consumers and advertisers in the very same market, piggybacking on the competitor’s resources. GateHouse’s President and Chief Operating Officer, Kirk Davis, said: “By trying to equate its conduct with legitimate and widespread linking practices which permeate the Internet, it is The New York Times’ counterclaims that threaten those established practices as well as fair competition in online journalism. The simple reality is that The New York Times chose to disregard these principles with its serial copying and display of GateHouse’s original content on the boston.com “YourTown” websites, which it has turned around and offered to readers in the same towns served by GateHouse’s WickedLocal websites. We will defend these meritless counterclaims vigorously and consistent with controlling legal principles of fair use.”

GateHouse Media, Inc., headquartered in Fairport, New York, is one of the largest publishers of locally based print and online media in the United States as measured by its 92 daily publications. GateHouse Media currently serves local audiences of more than 10 million per week across 21 states through hundreds of community publications and local websites. GateHouse Media is traded on the over-the-counter market under the symbol “GHSE”.