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To end the silly feud between their New York City street newspapers, the New York Press's Jeff Koyen and The L Magazine's Scott Stedman will step into a Brooklyn boxing ring tonight.

What started with a literary sucker punch from one street publication to another has snowballed into a war of words, threats, and challenges. It began with a questionable beef over corner news bins, came to a head with a racy remark about someone's mother, and now it's going to be settled in a Brooklyn boxing ring.

Tonight Scott Stedman, the editor-in-chief and founder of The L Magazine, faces off against Jeff Koyen, editor-in-chief of the New York Press, at Gleason's Gym in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. The undercard includes bouts between other members of both publications and will benefit Mainchance, a group serving New York's homeless population.

So what brought these two editors to blows? It's not entirely clear. But here's a rough backstory.

When the New York Sports Express, a Press offshoot that lists Koyen as its editor-in-chief, launched in June, the New York Press editor noticed that The L used the same bright-orange distribution boxes as the Express. Of course, The L had debuted a month or two earlier, so it's possible that Koyen realized this coincidence earlier than he acknowledges and wanted to exploit it.

Either way, exploit it he certainly did. The "Billboard" front-of-book section of short thoughts and notes in the June 11-17 issue of the Press included a caveat intended to prevent readers from seeing the identical containers and picking up the wrong publication. "Though an unfortunate coincidence, that dreadful lil' L Magazine is distributed through boxes of the same size, shape and color as our new darling," Koyen wrote. He joked that The Press had already "put aside a few bucks to buy" The L's boxes "as soon as they run through their startup cash."

It was the first warning shot in what would become an increasingly scathing series of attacks Koyen published in his paper mocking Stedman and his upstart mag.

Stedman's initial response was to call Koyen and challenge him and his staff to an L vs. Press soccer match. "We had just played against Vogue," Stedman explains. "And I was in sports mode." Koyen, however, was not in such a mode. The Press editor "flipped out," Stedman says. "He though it was lame." Even so, in the June 25-July 8 L, Stedman printed a full-page color ad announcing the match. It closed with the note, "Will They Show?" and it quoted Koyen's "dreadful lil' L Magazine" remark, but, beyond that, it didn't attack Koyen or his publication.

Still, Koyen clearly felt provoked. His next attack was much more personal. In the July 2-8 "Billboard" section, Koyen hit back, running a yearbook-type photo of a preppyish and smiling Stedman that he obtained from Union College, Stedman's alma mater. The accompanying text portrayed Stedman as an upper-class dilettante who upon returning from a post-college year-long fellowship in Europe decided to replicate the pocket-sized listings guides he found in capital cities along the way. In the masthead of that Press issue, Koyen added Stedman's name, alongside the job title "Bitch."

That's when Stedman challenged Koyen to a boxing match. In the previous Press, Koyen had dismissed the soccer match as "collegiate" and instead suggested a bare-knuckles street fight; The L replied by accepting that challenge but instead listing the event as a boxing match. Koyen at that point refused the boxing match—though L staffers suspect he might have gone into training at that point, in preparation for agreeing to the bout later on.

Then, on July 9, Koyen published yet another "Billboard" item attacking The L. It called the magazine a "wan semimonthly listings guide," said Stedman was only "temporarily funded," and termed his staff a "merry band of khaki-wearing lackwits." The item also dismissed the proposed boxing match as "an overexposed and simpleminded grab at Hemingway-style masculinity by way of a publicity stunt."

And Koyen added one more diss in the attack. "Staging a boxing match," he wrote, "is about as novel as your mother's snatch is to the pool boys at the country club." Stedman wasn't happy about the your-mother talk, and Koyen enjoyed that fact. "I knew it was the thing that annoyed him the most," he says. He reprinted the line in the October 15 New York Sports Express.

And so Stedman printed another ad, this time accepting Koyen's proposed alternative of "a bare-knuckle street fight." But it was really just an ad for the boxing match, which by this time Koyen had agreed to.

"It's just weird," says Stedman, who claims to be dumbfounded by Koyen's verbal assaults and uncertain of Koyen's motivation for targeting him—and his mother. The two men, they both acknowledge, print different types of publications and so are not in direct competition for readers. Koyen says he just made the original news bins crack for the hell of it, and was irritated by Stedman's immediate effort to create a PR coup. "It's playground snaps" he says of the mother remark.

But perhaps the real reason for Koyen's distaste is, surprisingly, an earnest one, contained—albeit with a sarcastic tone—in the July 2 "Billboard" screed: He's offended that The L's "Neighborhood Guide" is presenting paid advertisements as objective critiques of local venues. It's why, he says, he called Stedman's mag "editorially corrupt" in the July 9 "Billboard" item.

Stedman, for his part, denies the corruption, pointing to a disclaimer in the listings section of his publication's untraditional listings write-ups. "Sponsored by businesses in each neighborhood, we offer our readers a selective composite of what services are available and by whom, as well as offering local businesses an opportunity to advertise their valued service," it reads.

Koyen mocked exactly that disclaimer with an phony ad in the July 15 Press soliciting "Neighborhood Guide" listings for The L. "Can you spot the difference between 'real' and 'sponsored' editorial?" its headline read. Stedman says the parody prompted many calls from interested businesses who thought the ad was real.

And while the description of the upcoming fight—under the heading of "Best Beatdown"—in the Press's "Best of Manhattan" issue contained more of the usual L bashing, it again called attention to the The L's "Neighborhood Guide":

"Though readers are informed in agate that these back-of-the-book pages are 'sponsored' by advertisers, the fact that they are identical in design and layout causes us to cry foul.... The editors are trying to deceive readers by not being clear in the division between paid and unpaid editorial. This is unacceptable."

It's true: The disclaimer is definitely hard to discern from the rest of the page. It begins by pointing out that the listings are provided "in lieu of escort advertisements and she-male bodywork," and this seems to be Stedman's justification for the policy when questioned about it, highlighting a sort of moral superiority to many alt-weeklies—including the Press—that sell a good number of these sex ads.

He doesn't buy that Koyen is making any larger point than making his own jokes. "Every punch I take is for my mother," says Stedman. "Every punch he takes is for his mediocre sarcastic wit."

[Addendum, October 30: "It was a draw," reports our man in Dumbo, mb news editor David Hirschman. "Totally unsatisfying in every way. They're having a rematch November 21. They did hit hard, though."]

Matt Elzweig is a freelance writer in New York.