Columbia Journalism Review has a
treatise by Michael Shapiro about the Mercury News and what might have been, before the digital revolution, before Knight-Ridder peddled the newspaper to McClatchy, which peddled it to Dean Singleton’s MediaNews. It’s sad and illuminating, not that the Merc’s fate as best-of-breed in Bay Area News Group is any worse than other newspapers once with resources to match ambition. Here’s his description of the Merc’s physical plant:
The Merc is headquartered in a white wedding cake of a building that sits off a highway, and across from a largely deserted mall. There is a red linotype machine in the lobby, and late on a rainy afternoon it seems to be the only splash of animation in a building where voices feel not so much hushed as absent. The conference room looks out onto a dim and quiet newsroom . . . After one of several rounds of newsroom layoffs, a photographer went through the building taking pictures not of people—the people had left—but of rows of empty cubicles, stacked computer terminals, blank bulletin boards, and vacant corridors.
Mercury News,
Newspapers
Columbia Journalism Review has a treatise by Michael Shapiro about the Mercury News and what might have been, before the digital revolution, before Knight-Ridder peddled the newspaper to McClatchy, which peddled it to Dean Singleton’s MediaNews. It’s sad and illuminating, not that the Merc’s fate as best-of-breed in Bay Area News Group is any worse than other newspapers once with resources to match ambition. Here’s his description of the Merc’s physical plant:
