Categories: OLD Media Moves

Utah biz magazines in legal tussle

The Salt Lake Tribune is reporting that the publisher of Utah’s biggest business magazine is waging a legal battle against the publisher of an upstart competitor.

Reporter Paul Beebe wrote, “In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in 3rd District Court, Utah Business Magazine owner Olympus Publishers accuses MediaOne Corp. and Shereece Steed, an advertising saleswoman, of using confidential Utah Business information to drive advertisers to the newly launched Utah CEO magazine.Â

“MediaOne, formerly Newspaper Agency Corp., is the company that handles printing, advertising and circulation tasks for The Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret Morning News. MediaOne is jointly owned by MediaNews Group, parent company of The Tribune with a 58 percent share, and the LDS Church, which owns the Morning News.Â

“MediaOne CEO Brent Low said the suit is without merit.Â

“‘NAC-MediaOne has the biggest advertising data base in Utah,’ Low said Friday. ‘We would not seek to take information from a competitor, and we have not sought to take information in this case.’Â

“Steed said she had not been notified of the suit and declined to comment.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.