I took the witness stand today to testify in the Guardian’s lawsuit against the SF Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, the chain formerly known as New Times. I talked about why I worked for the Guardian, why I’d stuck around for more than 25 years and why I believe in the paper’s misssion.
The point I tried to make: The Guardian is a community institution. We care about this city; we care about people and issues and arts and culture, and whether you agree or disagree with our political stands, we’re part of San Francisco — and our readers have always known that. The Weekly is part of a chain based in Phoenix.
And yeah, I think local ownership matters, and I think independent papers matter, and I think it sucks that the Weekly has been selling ads below cost and trying to hurt our ability to compete. The Weekly has been losing tons of money; when VVM/New Times owned the East Bay Express, that paper lost tons of money, too. Over the past 11 years, the chain has lost $25 million in the Bay Area. That’s what happens when you sell ads for less than the cost of producing them.
And it only works, and it only makes sense, if you have a big chain that can subsidize the losses in the hope that the locally owned competitor will be driven out of business. (That, by the way, is what this suit is all about.)
As I pointed out, I don’t have the luxury the SF Weekly editors do; I have to live with the money we make by selling ads. If that revenue goes down, I have to cut costs. The Weekly editors don’t have to meet that kind of budget; they can just get more money from headquarters.
The Weekly’s lawyer, Ivo Labar, went after me pretty hard on cross-examination. He tried that old saw that the Guardian writes too many stories about PG&E; I told him that if the Washington Post had decided that Watergate was a one-day story, American history would be very different. He suggested that I was a bad editor and that the paper was losing readers because we had nothing valuable to say. I’m afraid I have to disagree.
But in the end, the facts and the law are on our side in this case. I’ll keep you posted.
PS: BeyondChron has been doing a good job covering the trial, which, the online news outlet points out, is about more than just a business dispute — it’s crucial to the future of independent media.