Since the trial finally opened Jan. 29, the Bay Guardian and VVM's SF Weekly have been slugging it out not only in the courtroom of California Superior Court Judge Marla J. Miller, but also after-hours in the blogosphere, with detailed accounts of the day's testimony that can run as long as 3,000 words -- and yet at times have nearly nothing in common.
Trial resumes Tuesday, and the case could go to the jury as early as Wednesday. In essence, the Bay Guardian is suing SF Weekly and VVM under a California law adopted in a more populist era that makes it illegal to price product below cost in order to harm a competitor.
Accounting experts for the Guardian estimate VVM, making up for SF Weekly losses with profits from alt-papers in markets with no direct competition, hurt the Guardian to the tune of $5 million to $11 million. SF Weekly financial and industry experts say the whole case is nonsense. If the Guardian is hurting, it's because of the well-known woes of newspapers compounded by fierce alternative competition in the Bay Area and the Bay Guardian's own incompetence, SF Weekly argues.
Commercial lawsuits like the Bay Guardian's almost never actually go to trial, let alone to the jury. The fact that this one is going all the way is a testament not only to the enmity between the two papers, but the outsized protagonists in case: Bay Guardian co-owner and Editor and Publisher Bruce B. Brugmann and VVM's Executive Editor Mike Lacey.
Some of the tensions reflect the hostility locally owned alternatives feel about the VVM and the supposed deleterious effect chain ownership has on alt-papers. My colleague Jennifer Saba and I covered this issue in last August's print edition of E&P.
The Guardian and SF Weekly are covering the trial with reports that are gleefully unconcerned about appearing objective, and recall the great newspaper feuds of yesteryear.
Executive Editor Tim Redmond, reporting for the Guardian, refers to his blogging counterpart at SF Weekly, VVM Executive Associate Editor Andy Van De Voorde, as an "out-of-town hit man," while Van De Voorde has taken to calling Redmond "Puffy," in reference to a fashionable coat he supposedly wore while testifying. I say "supposedly" because Redmond wrote that Van De Voorde got even that detail wrong.
"I don't expect him to be fair (and I'm sure nobody expects me to be fair, either -- we work for the two parties to the case)." Redmond wrote early in the trial. "But I have to say: his reporting has been breathtaking in its personal viciousness. I've seen a lot of hit pieces over the years, and been subject to them myself, but this is another order of magnitude altogether."
The flavor of the reporting can be seen by the blog headlines.
Here's a sample of the Bay Guardian's:
"Weekly publisher dodges the facts." "Mike Lacey ducks the big ones." "Weekly tries a 'gotcha' -- and fails." "Lacey: I'll bury the Guardian."
And here's some from SF Weekly:
"Imaginary Evidence." "The Guardian Gets a Reality Check from The New York Times." "Bruce Boils Over." "Guardian's Co-Publisher: No Sales Calls In 35 Years."
This is probably a good point to make my own full disclosure. Bruce Brugmann is a friend and occasional travel companion with whom not long ago I hoisted cocktails at a Caracas nightclub as a salsa band played at 1 a.m. I also wrote the editorial in December's print E&P deploring the shocking middle-of-the-night arrests of Lacey and VVM CEO Jim Larkin by Maricopa County Sheriff's officers seeking to enforce a specious subpoena. Both men acted with courage and integrity to fight the blatant attempts at censorship by intimidation by an out-of-control "special prosecutor" on behalf of the self-interests of Sheriff Joe Arpaiao. VVM's New Times is preparing a lawsuit in the case, something all friends of the First Amendment should support.
Wildly contradictory portraits of Brugmann and Lacey emerged from the separate accounts of their papers. Consider Feb. 5, for instance.
This is how SF Weekly's Van De Voorde saw it:
"Bay Guardian Publisher Bruce Brugmann exploded on the stand Tuesday, pounding his hand on the witness box, raising his voice, and growing red-faced during a rigorous cross-examination by SF Weekly attorney H. Sinclair Kerr Jr.
"The emotional display came near the end of nearly two hours of often-turbulent back-and-forth during which Kerr exposed numerous contradictions in Brugmann's testimony.
"Despite being on the stand for the better part of the day, a grumpy Brugmann provided no evidence to bolster the Guardian's claims that the Weekly and its former parent company, New Times Media, had engaged in predatory pricing. But he definitely made things interesting."
Same day, different reporter. The Bay Guardian account by Executive Editor Redmond:
"It was a wild day in court in the Guardian's lawsuit against the SF Weekly. Bruce Brugmann took the stand. He generally made the SF Weekly's lawyer look silly -- but the Weekly's out-of-town hit man, Andy Van De Voorde, was almost giddy with his attempts to say that Bruce Brugmann did poorly as a witness.
"I'm biased, of course (so is the hit man), but I have to disagree: Bruce laid out the Guardian's history, explained how the Weekly had attacked us, and stood up remarkably well under a cross-examination that may have given Van De Voorde something to write about, but didn't really present many relevant facts to the jury."
Then there was Lacey's Khrushchev moment, or maybe not. A former editor and a former sales rep testified that on Lacey's arrival at the Weekly in 1995 to announce that New Times, as the chain was then called, had bought the paper, the editor -- who in the recollection of one witness made an "intimidating" entrance and launched into a profanity-filled rant -- at one point picked up a copy of the Bay Guardian, threw it to the floor, and declared that the chain intended to "bury the Bay Guardian." Or maybe he said, as one witness recalled the "gist" of Lacey's remarks, the chain intended to "drive it out of business."
Didn't happen, Lacey said, when he testified about a week later. Patty Calhoun, a co-founder of Westword, the Denver alt-paper owned by VVM, was at that get-acquainted meeting, too, and she testified she couldn't recall the incident.
Like "Rashomon," but longer, the contradictory accounts go on and on. The Bay Guardian's lawsuit blog is at http://www.sfbg.com/lawsuit/
The SF Weekly's blog is here: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/sf_weekly_vs_sf_bay_guardian_l/
This week, it seems, we will at last learn how all the goings-on in the courtroom were viewed by an objective party -- the jury.