SF Weekly must pay Bay Guardian $15.6 million

The newsroom here is abuzz that the  San Francisco Bay Guardian just won a jaw-dropping $15.6 million in its unfair competition lawsuit against the local SF Weekly. That's far higher than the damages suggested by the Guardian's own expert, who set a range at $4-$11 million. Village Voice/New Times editor Mike Lacey says he will appeal.

I saw a small piece of the closing arguments last week and it was fascinating. The Weekly's closing argument was a crash course in the sad economics of Bay Area newspapering since 2001.

For now I'm far too busy on other projects to pay attention now, but I'll get some of my observations on this later tonight.

The two newspapers have both maintained blogs about the trial (SF Weekly here, SFBG here.)