The Mercury News is laying off 101 people by the end of the year, including 40 people in the news room, or a sixth of the newspaper’s 240 news gatherers, editors and other editorial staff.
The decision, announced today, comes after a surprisingly large decline of $1.7 million in advertising over the past month, compared to the same month the year before. That’s an acceleration of the hemorrhaging. April saw a decline of $500,000 compared to the same month before.
This is a sad development, for the paper and the Silicon Valley community it covers. The Merc, our former employer, has been one of our first reads every day. With 50 layoffs a year ago, and a subsequent acquisition by MediaNews, we’d thought the bad news was over for a while. This latest took everyone by surprise; we’ve just gotten off the phone with a former colleague who said he was stunned.
Here’s a snippet from the publisher’s letter:
Dear Colleagues:
A few weeks ago, I wrote to everyone about the challenges our business faces, both over the past six years and going forward. Since then, our business outlook has worsened and we have completed our budgeting process. Given continued declines in revenue, we need to reduce expenses significantly, and thus have no alternative but to implement a reduction in
work force.We plan on eliminating 101 positions by December 19th. The process of identifying individual employees subject to layoff is not yet complete.
Here is the Mercury News story today about the layoffs.
6 Comments
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Brian Solis said:
It’s sad and I hope they’re looking at tapping the Valley’s best and brightest to help them stop the bleeding and explore new ways to generate revenue - especially since the economy is encouraging businesses to loosen the purse strings again.
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Kempton said:
Sad day indeed. I’ve come to read and trust Mercury News as a good source of news about the Valley. I hope MN can get through this rough patch and be stronger. Good luck and all the best to everyone at the MN and those that will sadly be leaving.
Kempton
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Joseph Hunkins said:
Wow - is this simply from the migration of offline to online ad dollars?
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Matt Marshall said:
Well, they got hammered in real estate in particular. Who is going to a newspaper to look or real estate these days? It’s hard to tell exactly where it’s going, but you can be sure it is mostly online.
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Startups.in/India said:
That’s sad. But what about the revenues from Merc’s online site? Isn’t that compensating to an extent? May be if they are doing so bad offline then it is time they focus driving up the revenues from their online presence. As someone wisely said “Opportunities are never lost — someone else will take the ones you miss.”
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F Ho said:
It is sad to see this happen. However, I am surprised when you wrote “(t)his latest took everyone by surprise”. I thought this was a main concern for MediaNews taking over SJMN; from my point of view the Knight-Ridder sale dragging on was a roller coaster ride, with sale to McClatchy being a high point and the mood reversing when the subsequent sale was announced. The smart ones are those that jumped ship before this happened (I am not trying to be harsh here, as one has to land another good job first). Didn’t the same thing happened to the Oakland Tribune some years back when MediaNews bought it?
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4:15 pm
Rethinking the Merc said:
[...] to the San Jose Mercury News. After a series of demoralizing cuts that seemed destined to precipitate the newspaper’s slide into oblivion, [...]