Goodbye Bruce Brugmann
Bruce Brugmann and his wife are the largest shareholders in the SF Bay Guardian, a Marxist weekly, that has been around for 40 years flogging Lefty Fundamentalist hate and attacking the PG&E monopoly.
The SF Bay Guardian is in its last days. If they owe you money, collect it now. First, the Onion is coming to San Francisco,
in a few months, to take advertising away from the Bay Guardian, just as the
S.F. Weekly and the daily S.F. Examiner have been doing for several years. All four are free papers, based on ad
revenue.
The death knell of the Bay Guardian is described in the S.F. Weekly. The facts come out because of a lawsuit filed by the Guardian against the Weekly.
Two years ago, Brugmann bought a building to house his newspaper; he paid $4.7 million for the building. Formerly the Guardian rented space at $200,000 per year. With the new building, the rent equivalent payment is $600,000. Brugmann can’t afford his new building. He is cutting his ad rates to stay in business and basing his suit against the Weekly on the claim that the Weekly is undercutting ad rates. (Which is probably not illegal.) The Weekly has affidavits from advertisers showing the Guardian offering rates that are well below the printing costs of the Guardian and much lower than the Weekly’s ad rates.
Before we say goodbye to Bruce Brugmann, I want history to
remember that Brugmann was a disgrace as a journalist. Brugmann had one overriding lifetime
obsession: attacking PG&E, our local utility.
PG&E operated in San Francisco on a contract with the City. Turns out that the contract
expired a few years ago, after 50 years. PG&E and the City worked out a secret agreement for another 50-year
monopoly. The agreement only had to be visible for two weeks, between the first
and second vote of the S.F. Board of Supervisors. During those two weeks, when Brugmann learned of the new 50-year
monopoly agreement, the Guardian was unable to call any attention to wh
at was
going on. The new monopoly contract was
signed with virtually no opposition.
Brugmann, who had obsessed about this issue for thirty years, at that point, had never bothered to check the terms of the City-PG&E contract to know that it was about to expire. Bad research? No --- incompetence.
(Disclosure: Henry Dakin is a longtime friend of mine and a shareholder in the Guardian.)
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