Posted on 06/26/2013 12:19:01 PM PDT by Navy Patriot
The parent company of the San Francisco Examiner sued the Hearst Corporation Tuesday, accusing its San Francisco Chronicle of illegally targeting Examiner advertisers with secret, below-cost rates in an attempt to bleed the smaller paper.
The San Francisco Newspaper Company, which owns the Examiner, SF Weekly, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, alleges that the Chronicle offered ad space to advertisers for a fraction of its cost on the condition that the advertisers not buy ads in the Examiner.
"Hearst has demanded and obtained agreements from key advertising customers, which preclude those customers from purchasing any advertising space from the Examiner for a period of a year or more," said the suit, which was filed in San Francisco Superior Court. "In many cases, these discounts were specifically conditioned on the advertiser agreeing to purchase advertising services exclusively from Hearst and requiring it to stop doing business with the Examiner."
The suit calls for an injunction prohibiting the Chronicle from selling below-cost ads. The suit also requests financial damages "in an amount to be proven at trial." Per the law, that dollar figure could then be tripled.
The California Unfair Practices Act limits a business' ability to sell goods or advertising below cost. It also prohibits secretly offering varying rates to different customers for the same services, or doling out "loss leaders. A loss leader is a giveaway or deep discount on additional services used as an incentive to sweeten a separate deal. In one such instance, the suit says the Chronicle threw in $200,000 worth of free ad space in a deal with one advertiser.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfexaminer.com ...
The Chron, facing eventual bankruptcy, is trying to rebuild it's ad revenue devastated by declining circulation numbers.
Lying about circulation numbers no longer works with today's savvy advertisers who withhold their ad dollars for more effective ads.
Back when the Guardian was published by progressive Bruce Bruggman, the Guardian was suing the Examiner-owned SFWeekly for the same thing. Newspaper wars are sort of fun to watch.
“The far Socialist left SF Examiner”
The Examiner is fairly conservative. I’ve had correspondence with their past editor (last name was Forte) and he was *very* conservative on social and fiscal issues.
Rule 1: California is Bizarro World, common sense reacts like antimatter here.
Rule 2: California has the Rule of Gay, this is substantially different from the Rule of Law. (See my tagline)
Rule 3: In California everything not required is forbidden, which is a corollary of Rand's The State has no power over an honest man.
The Ex was very recently sold (yet again), and proffered an editorial that they intended to be more reflective of the SF community.
They succeeded, dumping more than 85% of the content of the previous reasonably responsible Examiner. They now rival the Chronicle in every area of Socialist left disingenuous degeneracy.
However both the Examiner and Chronicle continue to be printed upon the finest horse manure base parchment.
Oh, wow. Thanks for the update.
“Newspaper wars are sort of fun to watch.”
Yeah, because they are both spending money that they don’t have.
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