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.
Several times during cross examination, Weekly attorney H. Sinclair Kerr tried to pull the legal equivalent of a “gotcha.” He kept pushing the notion that the media marketplace in San Francisco is so crowded with so many competitors that the Weekly and the Guardian really aren’t fighting over a discrete slice of that market. Bruce had none of it. Kerr kept trying to get Bruce to talk about competition in general and kept trying to get him to admit that the Weekly isn’t our biggest or most important competitor; Bruce would have none of it.
“I’m talking about competition in general,” Kerr said at one point.
“Well, I’m talking about competition with New Times,” Bruce replied.
Kerr tried to say Bruce wasn’t much of a publisher because he didn’t go on sales calls, but Bruce made quick work of that, too, saying that he was the Guardian’s editor as well, that editors generally don’t do sales calls, that we have a sales staff to do that, and besides “I’m a busy guy – I’m blogging.”
The jury members laughed.