San Jose Mercury News to Lay Off 60 Reporters Due to Internet

Grade the News reports that MediaNews, the parent company of the Pulitzer Prize-winning daily paper San Jose Mercury News, will be laying off 60 reporters from Silicon Valley's premiere news source. That's nearly a quarter of the news staff. Like many newspapers across the country, MediaNews blames the internet for its financial failures.

Though the cuts haven't been announced officially yet, the leak came from a reputable source: John Bowman, executive editor of *San Mateo County Times, *also owned by MediaNews:

The staff reductions were discussed at an April meeting [Bowman] attended at the Mercury News along with top editors of MediaNews, which now owns every paid daily newspaper around the San Francisco Bay but the San Francisco Chronicle. The proposed cuts would affect 24% of the 250 member Mercury News

Mr. Bowman said he disclosed the layoff plan and resigned as executive editor of the *Times *because he was fed up with MediaNews' policies of trying to run newspapers short-handed.

San Jose Mercury News executive editor Susan Goldberg also quit two weeks ago to begin a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which is owned by Wired parent company Advance Publications. She has not said whether this move was related to the threat of job cuts.

Grade the News reporter John McManus contextualizes the Merc layoffs:

Reductions in staff have been common at newspapers across the country in recent years. The San Francisco Chronicle 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, according to figures compiled by the Newspaper
Association of America. Their most recent data shows those losses are accelerating.

Unleashing all those highly trained journalists on the world can hardly be a bad thing: I predict there will be more well-researched news blogs and podcasts in coming months, created by traditional reporters who've gone over to the Web side. The Merc's loss is our gain.