With studies showing that an increasing number of mainstream businesses find value in targeting the gay market, a number of business expos designed to introduce companies to the GLBT community have begun to appear nationwide. On April 29 the Greater San Diego Business Association (GSDBA), San Diego’s GLBT chamber of commerce, hosted its second annual expo. But when it came time to promote the event, GSDBA organizers say support from San Diego’s primary business weekly was noticeably lacking.

Among the local media that covered the event were the San Diego Union-Tribune, which ran a story on the front page of its financial section, Metropolitan Magazine, the Hillcrest News, KPBS Radio and the local gay media. High on the list of priorities for the GSDBA was targeting, through both advertising and editorial content, the San Diego Business Journal (SDBJ). However, GSDBA organizers say they were disappointed to find that not only was the expo ignored in the Journal’s editorial pages, a signed contract to include an insertion of the expo’s program was invalidated by the paper’s acting publisher, Matt Toledo, just before the event.

“As a publicist, I respect the judgment of editors who decide what stories best fit their publications,” said Frank Sabatini, who handled public relations for the GSDBA’s event. “But in this case, it was like pitching a story about a unique car show to an automotive magazine and being told they don’t cover car news. From an editorial standpoint, the oversight creates a disservice to their readers and doesn’t make sense. … Marketing to gays is a significant business trend occurring in our own backyard. The Union-Tribune clearly understood the value of the story and gave it big coverage, yet our city’s main business journal wouldn’t touch it before or after the event.”

In a recent phone interview, San Diego Business Journal Editor John Hollon said that the Journal does not make a practice of covering business expos here in San Diego.

“There are tons of them,” Hollon said. “If we wanted to just cover those we would have nothing else in the paper because there are so many going on all of the time. Every single one thinks theirs is the most important and the best and it’s just virtually impossible for a weekly the size of ours.”

However, GSDBA organizers were firm in their impression that the lack of coverage from the Journal had less to do with the fact that it was just another business expo and more to do with the fact that the GSDBA is a GLBT organization.

Sabatini, who planned months in advance to promote the expo said, “Finally, this year, in talking with a reliable editorial source who asked to remain anonymous, I was told outright the paper’s decision to pass up the story came from ‘higher up’.”

Adding to the troubles with the Journal was the decision to remove an insertion from the paper, after the GSDBA had a signed contract for it and the paper’s director of advertising, Diane Lavine, had approved the insert. According to Lavine, the decision to pull the insert was made by the paper’s publisher, Toledo.

“I went ahead and I approved this business and he was in Mexico, and when he came back from Mexico he vetoed my signature, is essentially what happened,” Lavine told the Times. “My whole set of circumstances isn’t real standard in that I have been with the company for seven months and I have no acting direct publisher. I didn’t see a problem with inserting a business-to-business piece, regardless of the organization or the origin or what have you. The reason why my publisher, Matt Toledo, vetoed it was because there were previous ads sold into the piece and we would be brokering out our space at rates that don’t reflect our rate card.”

Lavine said the GSDBA was compensated with $12,000 in free ad space and they were completely reimbursed for all of the money they had paid to the Business Journal for advertising. She went on to say that she also bought the GSDBA members she had worked with gift baskets to personally apologize for the situation.

Joyce Marieb, the executive director of the GSDBA, met with Toledo to discuss the situation. “We got no where with him,” Marieb said. “He said he would give us some free ads and we agreed to take them, but we never agreed they would be a buy-off for not ever speaking up again, and he expected us to go away and be happy about it. We did go away because we wanted to have our expo without having turmoil, and now we are ready to respond to them.”

Whether actual or perceived, the members of the GSDBA pointed out to Toledo that the paper’s actions would appear to be discriminatory towards the GLBT community. Marieb also pointed out that the businesses that purchased ad space in the expo program did so with the understanding that 16,000 copies of the program would be distributed in the Business Journal.

When asked if she felt that the Journal was discriminating against the GSDBA, Marieb said: “Yes, I do. I just feel that if I were a business person and I had signed a contract and you know they publish all kinds of things in that paper for the Hispanic chamber, and they wouldn’t hesitate, I don’t think, for the Asian chamber, but they hesitated with us. It just smacks of [discrimination] to me. I mean I don’t have direct proof, but I think it’s there.”