Return fire in Beverly Hills

They may not describe it as war, but the Beverly Hills papers are at the least having a public spat. After being called out by its rival the Courier, the Beverly Hills Weekly responds in print through columnist Rudy Cole. In a piece in the Dec. 8 issue headlined "Are We Going To Have Newspaper Wars In BH?," Cole writes:

The Courier may not welcome the competition, but the Weekly is here and is now the only locally-owned newspaper in the city. Even the Courier representative calls some other city home....

Competition between newspapers is good for any city--it provides for a diversity of views. The Weekly is not at war with the Courier and it is not the first publication to provide competition, only the most durable. When the Courier began, as a successor to a newspaper I once edited, it too threatened other publications, but it survived, and under March Schwartz’s leadership, thrived.

The Courier is simply not the same without Schwartz....I have never made a secret of my Democratic roots and the new Courier publisher has an equal affinity for all things Republican. But a newspaper war? Hardly.

The column opens with an anecdote about a representative of the Courier telling a city council member on live TV "you do have a death wish” for siding with the Weekly in a dispute over legal ads.