- James Yamasaki
There was a time, as I wrote in 2010, when "the Bay Guardian seemed to have a nice future. It had won local and national journalism awards (including the prestigious Polk Award, for a 2005 look at 'subhuman conditions' in San Francisco housing projects), it had a growing audience, and it had enough profit every year to keep expanding the business." Its owner was a classic San Francisco lefty who likened his civic role to that of a Revolutionary War pamphleteer, and every week's paper edition was stamped with the motto "Print the news and raise hell."
How the Bay Guardian got from that to this is, I imagine, a story that former Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann would want to tell in a dark neighborhood bar. (From 2010: "When I arrived at the Bay Guardian offices, it was nearing cocktail hour and Brugmann had been itching to introduce me to something called the Potrero Hill Martini. 'I'd serve you one in my office,' he said, 'but I checked the ice and it's melted. You can't serve a martini without ice' ... We left for the bar, Brugmann driving us in his small, messy sedan, old copies of the Bay Guardian stashed along the dashboard, his trunk full of the latest edition, which he likes to personally deliver here and there. The clock in his car was running three hours slow, which seemed like a hard thing to account for. He said it had something to do with recent work on the vehicle, though if work had been done, it clearly wasn't completely successful; aside from the clock being on New Zealand time, his 'Check Engine' and 'ABS' lights were on. A ragtime tape played on the cassette player.")
For now, absent any inside knowledge of how this all went down, I can only direct you to the paper's website, which correctly describes the loss of "a leading voice for progressive San Francisco since 1966," and to what I found when I dug into Brugmann's epic court fight with the San Francisco Weekly. It involved "seized delivery vans, murderous editors, irate blog posts, allegations of insanity, connections to the Church of Satan, illegal predatory-pricing schemes, and more than $21 million on the line." It ends with a man who thinks he's closing in on a big fish.
