The San Francisco Bay Guardian expects to move into its own $4.7 million building sometime this month – where they will "never have to worry about an eviction … never have to worry about a bad landlord," says Executive Editor Tim Redmond. A 1950s era law banning SBA loans to media companies was repealed in 1994. Milwaukee’s Shepherd Express took advantage of the program in 1995. Now the Bay Guardian has swung a deal for a 30,000-square-foot building with a rooftop view of the Bay Bridge thanks to an SBA loan guarantee package.
Under a settlement with the city, Bay Area newspapers have agreed to let the city erect pedmounts in high-traffic areas. Problem is, a subsidiary of media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications will control those pedmounts, who gets to use them and what's advertised on the back. "The idea of giving Clear Channel exclusive control over newspaper distribution -- and ad space on the back of the news racks -- in the city is extremely troubling," the San Francisco Bay Guardian writes.
In an article penned by Executive Editor Tim Redmond, the 35-year-old weekly announces that it has "launched the first stage of a legal offensive to stop" its New Times-owned competitor "from engaging in anticompetitive business practices that may violate federal and state (antitrust) laws." Redmond also details a settled lawsuit in which the Bay Guardian charged a sales rep who had decided to jump ship with secretly downloading over 1,000 pages of sales records and providing them to her then-new employer, SF Weekly.
The work of a half dozen alternative newsweekly music writers appears in “Da Capo Best Music Writing 2001”, published this month. Guest editor, Nick Hornby, calls the collection “a dip full of good stuff.”
Bruce B. Brugmann, publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, is one of four International Press Institute delegates who went to South Korea to investigate the arrest of three newspaper owners/publishers. The IPI "press freedom mission" met with members of the South Korean government and legislature, and held a news conference in Seoul on Sept. 6.
The Nashville Scene and the San Francisco Bay Guardian snag nearly a dozen awards in the National Newspaper Association's Better Newspaper Contest. NNA will recognize the winners in all 125 categories at its 116th annual convention in September.
