The Mercury News will eliminate sixty more newsroom positions this summer, according to Grade the News.
If true, this is tough news, because the Mercury News has long been considered the voice of Silicon Valley. Many may disagree. However, the Merc has offered a good cross-section of the valley’s business news, from real estate developments, to stock fraud to financial advice about state tax changes and more. It’s easy for us bloggers to chew off a niche and survive, but who is going to do the heavy duty investigative pieces about local labor exploitation, justice system scams, city corruption and environmental scandals that the Merc has done so well over the years? These are stories areas were advertisers don’t easily congregate.
I left the Merc last year to launch VentureBeat, but the Merc is still a daily read. Grade the News says cuts -– almost one in four of the total — are to be eliminated at the San Jose Mercury News this summer after a layoff moratorium negotiated with the local Newspaper Guild expires.
David Satterfield, managing editor of the Mercury News, refused to discuss staff cuts, but told the publication: “I think it has been a difficult start to the year…That’s the word we keep getting from our advertising department.”
This comes after the SF Chronicle — the other major newspaper in Silicon Valley — announced May 18 that it would trim 100 newsroom jobs from its 400-member staff in coming months.
Newspapers have been losing both subscribers and advertisers to the Internet, and the trend is accelerating.
6 Comments
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markg said:
fast forward 3 years…there will be no editorial positions at newspapers, they will simply harvest and pay for best web content they can find
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Pran Kurup said:
Sad to hear. Clearly a sign of changing times, driven largely by the net. Interestingly, there was an article about how the newspaper business (print) in India is booming.
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Tracy Allison ALtman said:
I hate hearing this. The Merc is a must-read for me, always doing a great job covering business, arts, life in the Valley. I don’t see a replacement for their stories — topic-specific blogs are OK for certain types of info, but we need their “voice”. (And please, don’t let them do away with Mr. Roadshow!)
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C said:
Put down the crackpipe MarkG.
There will be editorial positions at papers because web content prodcers don’t put the time & resources into investigative reporting, simply cause the economics don’t warrant it. newpapers will just have to find a way to make money w/ the overhead they need to put out a decent product, i.e switching to tabloid vs. broadsheet, smaller pagecounts, etc.
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Slartibardfast said:
Sad news. I have enjoyed home delivery of the Merc for years but recently it seems like there’s been a lot more ads and a lot less quality journalism. It’s as if the paper has become wholly sponsored by Frys and Macy’s with their multiple full page ads and wrap-around advertising of the various sections of the paper.
Now that I hear this layoff news, I sadly will have to cancel my subscription because it simply wont be worth it any more to keep subscribing when they are cutting back on quality. I had been hoping they would hang in there and somehoe manage to turn it around.
The above (non-crack-smoking) poster does not seem to understand that web content producers will, increasingly, in fact put more and more time money and resources into investigative reporting, simply because they are starting to make more money (through online advertising) and they can operate more affordably while the print media make dumb moves like this one from the Mercury News and subsrcibers like me move wholly the web because the paper completely sucks. I wish it wasn’t so.
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Bria said:
hi nice post, i enjoyed it
