In court this week, a Guardian witness disavowed a key piece of evidence -- AAN's financial standards report -- that the paper was using to prove its predatory pricing charge against SF Weekly, the East Bay Express and Village Voice Media. The witness backed away from the AAN report after the Weekly's attorney's produced an affidavit from the woman who had compiled it asserting that it was unaudited and self-reported, "rendering it meaningless as a measure of financial performance," the Weekly reports. After considering this and motions from both parties on Wednesday and Thursday, the Weekly says the judge "ultimately concluded that the Weekly deserved additional time to respond, a decision which could delay the long-awaited trial." Naturally, the Guardian sees this week's developments a little differently. "If this is how the SF Weekly and the VVM guys from Phoenix are going to cover the trial, we're going to have to spend a lot of time correcting the record," Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond writes. He says that the Weekly's attorneys had "tried desperately" to keep the Guardian's witness from taking the stand at all, and sees the disavowal of the AAN financial data as inconsequential. The witness had developed two scenarios to show how much money the Guardian had lost, and not being allowed to use the AAN data, he will just rely on the other standards instead, according to Redmond.

Continue ReadingBay Guardian/VVM Trial Begins

The predatory pricing suit against SF Weekly and Village Voice Media asserts that the Weekly sold ads below cost to push the Guardian out of business. (The suit also names former VVM property East Bay Express as a defendant.) VVM executive editor Michael Lacey thinks Bay Guardian publisher/editor Bruce Brugmann is using the Weekly as a "scapegoat" for his own problems in dealing with new challenges in print media. "[The lawsuit] is how he's hoping to maintain his business in a really tough media market," Lacey tells The San Francisco Daily Journal, a local legal publication. But Brugmann disputes this notion. "From our point of view, the fact that the economy is not good and there are other problems in this business only makes this problem more acute," he says. Jury selection is set to begin tomorrow in San Francisco County Superior Court. Legal experts tell the Daily Journal that predatory-pricing cases face different odds depending on where they are filed, adding that California superior courts are generally seen as more friendly to plaintiffs than federal courts.

Continue ReadingBay Guardian/VVM Trial Scheduled to Begin Tomorrow

Trulia has announced a new platform which allows publishers to use the company's online real estate tools to create co-branded sites with real estate guides, heat maps and home sales information, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Village Voice Media, Kiplinger, and American Towns are all partnering with Trulia in the new venture.

Continue ReadingVillage Voice Media Partners With Trulia for Online Real Estate

In the first year-over-year comparisons using its monthly chart of the most popular newspaper websites, Editor & Publisher reports that Village Voice Media grew its traffic 127 percent from Nov. 2006 to Nov. 2007. Over the same period of time, total minutes spent on the company's sites increased by 89 percent. VVM's network of sites ranked 10th in traffic last month, with a total of 2,774,000 unique visitors, according to E&P.

Continue ReadingVillage Voice Media Web Traffic Up 127 Pecent From Last Year

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas announced this afternoon that he was dismissing the case against Village Voice Media executives Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey, who were arrested last night after publishing a story revealing that their Phoenix New Times was a target of a grand jury probe. Thomas said that the case had been grossly mishandled, according to the Arizona Republic. "It has become clear to me the investigation has gone in a direction I would not have authorized," Thomas says. The grand jury had been convened to investigate charges that the New Times violated the law when it posted Sheriff Joe Arpaio's home address on its website in 2004.

Continue ReadingAll Charges in New Times Case Dropped

The editor tells MediaBistro he's most proud of bringing "a newsier focus to the front of the book" and the addition of a metro column by Tom Robbins. Though the early '07 storyline painted the Voice as a newspaper rife with inner turmoil and conflict, Ortega says that wasn't what he saw when he arrived. "I didn't find tumult so much as a group of people wanting to end the distractions and simply put out a newspaper," he says. "Those first few weeks were busy, but almost right away we were focused on the things that matter, like developing good stories." He also says that he -- like others at the AAN Convention last month -- remains "cautiously optimistic" about the future of the alt-weekly. "The dailies, after all, are being told by consultants to go free, increase local coverage, and write with some attitude -- all things we're already doing," he says.

Continue ReadingFour Months In, Tony Ortega Discusses the State of The Village Voice