An expert witness for the SF Weekly put a bunch of charts before the jury Friday, trying to undermine the Guardian’s predatory pricing case – but every one of the charts seemed to prove exactly what we’ve been trying to say.
The Guardian is suing the Weekly and its corporate parent, Village Voice Media, for predatory pricing. The claim is that the 16-paper chain poured millions into propping up the San Francisco paper, which for 12 years has lost money while it sold ads below the cost of producing them. That, we argue, was done to harm the locally owned competitor.
Clifford Kupperberg, the Guardian’s expert witness, put the damages at between $5 million and $11 million.
Everett Harry, an accountant who specializes in analyzing damage claims in litigation, tried to take apart Kupperberg’s analysis. One of his weapons: A series of “scattergrams,” graphic representations of large numbers of sales transactions for clients that have advertised in both the Weekly and the Guardian.
Harry tried to use the charts to argue that the Guardian wasn’t losing business to lower-priced Weekly ads. But the stunning fact was that every single scattergram showed that the Weekly was indeed selling ads below cost.