My company just took a $15 million hit in San Francisco, where the weekly Bay Guardian managed to convince a jury that our sister paper, SF Weekly, used a predatory pricing scheme to try to put it out of business. Here's the Guardian's story about the verdict, and a statement from my company, Village Voice Media, in the wake of its legal defeat, which it plans to appeal. Clearly, I have a bias here, but I've been on the receiving end of plaintiff Bruce Brugmann's email missives for some years now, and all I can say is that when my boss Mike Lacey once described Brugmann by writing, "imagine a needy ferret blogging," he nailed it. Brugmann is a whiny liberal ideologue who can't accept the idea that people would prefer to read smart, unpredictable news and commentary over affirmation pablum written by activist, unoriginal patchouli-oiled scribes who haven't had a haircut since 1978. Not to put too fine a point on it.
