RIP Mercury News
At the risk of offending my friends and former colleagues still at the San Jose Mercury News, I’m writing its obituary today. There will be more buyouts and layoffs this week, the fourth round of en-masse departures in the last few years. Sadly, I fear the paper will not recover.
I worked at the Merc for 11 years, and for about half that time we were a helluva little paper. We competed aggressively with the San Francisco Chronicle, we wrote big stories with sophistication, had a kick-ass state capital bureau, and for a time, we covered Silicon Valley and technology like no one else. A lot of really talented people moved through Ridder Park Drive in the decade I was there. That’s not to say we reporters didn’t bitch and moan about where we worked. We did, a lot. But looking back, we didn’t see how good we had it.
Now? Here’s what’s going to happen:
Managers from parent company Media News will continue to downsize the editorial staff until it’s down to several dozen people. (It’s at about 200 FTEs now, and will be 170 after Friday. New publisher Mac Tully has told the staff that downsizing could continue for the next 18-24 months.) They’ll consolidate the copy and design desks with their other Bay Area papers. They’ll work aggressively to get rid of union representation so they can bring salaries and benefits down to the substandard wages they are paying at their non-union papers. That will drive away whatever senior reporters are left, except those who are close to retirement (most of them are gone already) or who cannot find work elsewhere. And it will turn the paper into a waystation for young reporters looking to hone their skills and pad their resumes until something better comes along (being a mid-tier paper, that was already the case to some degree). The quality of the product will suffer.
Meanwhile, there will be little new investment in the online product, unless it can be done on the cheap or involves vendors who can promise immediate financial returns. The online staff will continue to be overworked. Innovation and risk-taking will suffer.
The Merc - thin and largely devoid of substantive, insightful coverage - will become increasingly irrelevant to most area news consumers - as many other Media News papers are in the rest of the Bay Area. People will lament the loss of a once good paper. But they’ll survive, because local news isn’t that important to them, and the rest they can get elsewhere.
At this point, you might be expecting a rant against Dean Singleton. But I don’t wholly blame him for this mess. I think “Mean Dean” believed what he said when he bought the Merc, called it Knight Ridder’s “jewel in the crown” and promised to make it an incubator of innovation. But, saddled with massive debt from his misguided newspaper purchases, and facing a horrendous industry downturn/restructuring/implosion, he can do only one thing: slash and burn. It’s what he does best.
It pains me to write this, pains me to know how this situation is affecting the lives of some really great journalists still at the Merc. The mood there is horrible this week, and I can only hope that as many people get out as soon as possible.
It also pains me because I steadfastly, and maybe naively, believed the Merc could have avoided this fate - or at least mitigated the pain - if someone in management had stepped up with a vision of what the paper should be.
Alas, the Merc has been rudderless for some time. The last executive at the Merc who tried to communicate a real vision for the newsroom was executive editor David Yarnold. Rightly or wrongly, he insisted the paper focus intently on the changing demographics of Silicon Valley and technology. These were not just empty newsroom goals or mission statements. The paper created one of the first Race and Demographics teams in the country and invested heavily in its technology coverage.
Of course, it was easy when Yarnold was editor, during the dot-com boom. The paper was rolling in the dough. The challenge wasn’t making money, it was figuring out how to spend it. But even in good times, knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing is important. It’s how you energize people and create meaning for their work.
It’s been some time since the Merc knew its purpose. In recent years, many of the strategic decisions about news coverage seemed defensive moves in response to cost-cutting. A well-known CEO from a huge valley Internet company visited the Merc once to meet with Tony Ridder and some editors. He said his biggest frustration with the Merc was that he couldn’t figure out what it was trying to be.
Some organizations can get by OK without strong leadership and a purpose. But in the long run, they won’t excel. You need vision to build a bridge from the present to the future. Without it, mediocrity rules (witness the difference between Google and Yahoo). During my time at the paper, technology journalism - one of the Merc’s franchises - exploded. Mainstream media outlets boosted their coverage of the valley, and tech blogs with sizeable audiences cropped up everywhere. The Merc needed to figure out its place in the new, expanded ecosystem and adapt accordingly. It needed a mental picture of what it wanted to be to guide its day-to-day decisions. In other words, “Given that these new competitors are eating our lunch, what should we do?” It never happened.
To its credit, the paper briefly tried to imagine a future for itself with its “Rethinking” project. But when Singleton realized the project’s modest ideas weren’t going to instantly solve his not-so-modest financial woes, and lacking broad newsroom support, the project stalled. Soon thereafter, executive editor and Rethinking champion Carole Leigh Hutton was gone.
The Mercury News isn’t restructuring or rethinking or imagining a new, meaner and leaner future. It is hanging on for dear life.
It doesn’t need to be this way. I still believe there are ways for media outlets like the Mercury News to survive in the current media landscape. But the conversation needs to start with a blank whiteboard. You can’t continue to tear off pieces of the current business and downsize your way into the future.
If you stop worrying about preserving the status quo for a moment, there are intriguing possibilities. Forget about print for a minute and just look at online. The conventional wisdom is that print is the bridge to an all-online future. But let’s say the Merc is already making $20 million annually in online revenue (a hypothetical number, probably generous). What kind of news and information site could you build with that from the ground up? Even if you peel off half that number for operations and administration and ad sales, you have $10 million left for editorial, enough salaries and benefits for about 100 people. That looks painfully small compared to what’s there now. But if you’re starting from scratch, it actually doesn’t look so bad. Especially if you have a laser focus on the type of content you’re going to produce and for whom. What if you really blew up the Merc and started over?
It’s a romantic notion and maybe not feasible. I’m not convinced, for instance, that local news is a valuable enough commodity. But if no one ever tries, how will we know? And if it fails? Well, as we’re seeing this week, the alternative is just as grim.
Side note: Ryan Sholin and I are both pondering the Merc’s fate this week. Go read him too.
05 Mar 2008 Michael
I just came over from Romenesko and landed here. As a longtime Merc and Chron reader, I think your particular laser beam has hit the mark twice. Both papers have fallen so far, so fast. It is like watching an two old friends wasting away from the same awful, terminal disease. Every morning when I go outside to get the papers, I am saddened to see that the two of them together aren’t much bigger than our local weekly, the Half Moon Bay Review.
I often speak to journalism students about career planning. They already know the bad news about newspapering. The newsies in many J-schools are increasingly outnumbered by what I call the PR and advertising pups. Bringing up the rear are the “back-pack” multimedia journalism students who don’t realize that they’re learning to be pack-mule journalists, not reporters.
Great post. Thanks for breaking it down for us, Michael. Well said.
Hmm, I was wondering what could possibly make me more depressed this week … thank God and Romenesko I able to find out.
I have nothing to add to what you say here, Michael, but I wanted to thank you for saying it so well. I spent 24 years at the Merc, through downtimes and good. I left just before the paper was sold (took the buyout in ‘05), or just before MediaNews decided to drive it off the cliff. My heart goes out to the friends still hanging on there.
[...] Michael Bazeley, who worked at the Merc for 11 years, was most recently our multimedia guru before leaving last fall. He writes an obit for the Merc, which I hope is premature: “It pains me to write this, pains me to know how this situation is affecting the lives of some really great journalists still at the Merc.” [...]
Sorry, Tom M. I thought long and hard about whether I was kicking the Merc while it was down. But this blog post has been welling up inside for some time - years, in fact. And the events of this week seemed the appropriate jumping off point. I’ll reiterate, too, what I said at the end. It doesn’t need to be this way.
What, have they got some kind of crystal ball down there in the basement of Boalt Hall?
Having lived in the Bay Area for many years and worked for a few years at an East Bay paper purchased by Singleton before moving north, I enjoy reading the papers when I am down in the Bay Area for a visit. Each visit is somewhat sad when I see the decline of the papers there. Cliched headlines that you’d only find in a second-rate college paper, unclear designs that give the reader three different elements, headline, photo and first few graphs of a story that don’t seem to jibe. Mostly the papers, all of them, seem like a jumbled mess. It is clear that there are still a few people with aspirations of greatness with focused team coverage of serious issues, but these efforts are mostly undone by pages that looked either slapped together like the last chopper out of Saigon is leaving in the next 10 minutes, or even worse, that they were put together weeks ago (IE no “new” news).
I realize papers figure people can get that “other” stuff elsewhere. But I question whether the stuff they are currently giving readers is really worth getting at all.
I give the Merc credit for hiring college grads hoping to move up. But I feel bad for the vets that found they had moved down a notch by staying in the same place. Prediction for the future? Like all other media entities…INTERNS, INTERNS INTERNS.
Sounds like what is happening at my former paper, The North County Times in San Diego County. Bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, as people who flee are not replaced, then buyouts that send the best and brightest packing. Those who are left either have to stay or have no long-term resume yet to get the next job and thus lack experience and judgment. It recently ran a story accusing an LA city councilman of strangling a kitten at a press conference because no one caught the “joke”. The paper has turned over most mid-level editor positions, some of them twice, in the past 6 months, as well as the publisher. Our corporate stock is down 75 percent in one year so who knows where that is going and our web efforts have become laughable? Of course we were no SJMN but we got some big stuff done for a tier-2 paper. Not anymore. Now it’s just collect the check and look for a new job.
nail on the head my friend! well said and i’ve heard this from you many times -oh wise one- when we spent those lonely days in the multimedia squatters village you set up at the merc. we miss you. and despite what happens in the future, remember there will always be passionate and talented journalists at the merc. even if only 100 compared to the 400 we were used to in the ‘good old days.’
we’re down but not out! i have hope that despite the constant blows we’re taking from medianews, we will prevail and win! right now you should here the theme from Rocky. eye of the tiger my friend. i may not be here tomorrow, but i still believe in this place, because what makes this place special are the people i’ve worked with for 15 years, not medianews, mcclatchy or knight ridder, we’ve seen them all come and go and we’re still here, smaller numbers, but still here trying our best to do good journalism. you can’t say the same for tony ridder can you? We’re here, he’s not. that’s all i’ve got and all i’ve got to hold on to is faith in my colleagues and the faint memory of a few merc employees.
-r
I came in to the Mercury News in 2000 under Knight Ridder. I loved my job the entire 7 years of employment. But when Dean Singleton came in and started gutting the place and hacking and slashing jobs as if employees were nothing more than wheat to be thrashed, I lost alot of respect for the man.
“Lean/Mean/Dean” wears his greed on his sleeve. My pre-press production job? Went to India along with 29 other people’s jobs when Dean disbanded our department. I feel sorry for the advertisers. They are the ones who are paying the price of having to deal with the inequities in their Ads as their Ads are being done by people who don’t know the squat about newspapers, printing, design, nor the English language and how to even use it.
Dean Singleton will get everything he’s been sewing, because everything that goes around, eventually comes back around . . . . 10 fold!
The full impact wont be official until tomorrow, but from what leaked out today, features will be further decimated. There will be no committed travel, film or TV writer. The food staff will be down to one, with the dismissal of the incredibly talented and committed Carolyn Jung. Apparently the attitude is: if we can get it from wire, good enough.
Even Bert Robinson, long management’s enthusiastic lapdog, remarked that people will be shocked when the metro names are released tomorrow.
It’s like they say of nuclear winter: the living will envy the dead.
Management has no long-term plan, other than the misguided hope that when the housing market turns around in 18-24 months, the advertising will come flooding back. Sort of like recruitment did, eh Dean?
The “rethinking” project was a joke from the start. It was more like “no thinking.”
[...] RIP Mercury News. One of two posts about the San Jose Mercury News, its past and its future (if it has one). The other is from Ryan Sholin and both are worth reading and applying some of the thoughts to newspapers everywhere. [...]
I vividly recall how eager I was to get into newspapers. Looking in the rear-view mirror it’s clear it wasn’t naive idealism: I thought it was a fascinating time for the industry, and I was excited to get in at a time when profound changes were clearly imminent.
I’m not sure which felt better: the thrill from the first time I knew an article I had written had profoundly affected someone, or the freeing relief when I became a “former” journalist. Sometimes I feel like a quitter, guilty of walking out on an industry that I know needs people who give a damn. But I was so very tired of feeling betrayed and undervalued, as a journalist and as a consumer of media. I wish more of us had the heart to stay in the scrum and be part of what I fervently hope will become a creative reinvention of the daily newspaper.
I’ll watch from the sidelines, with my fingers crossed for those who are trying to see the Merc — and other papers — to a brighter future.
[...] As of a couple minutes ago, Barb is essentially unemployed — she’s one of the folks getting their walking papers in the Mercury News’ latest round of layoffs (See RIP Mercury News by a former co-worker if you’ve got a morbid curiosity about what’s going on at Ridder Park Drive these days). [...]
Mike: I had no issues with the content, it’s just that the timing sucked. For me anyway.
Of course you had your newspeg and had to strike while it was current, I suppose.
I’m noticing one phenomenon Dean may not have anticipated: the rising tide of terrible things said in public by his former employees.
Must say that the natural born contrarian in me thinks I’d like to stick around to prove all the naysayers wrong. We’ll see how long my resolve lasts.
I’ve been back to the Merc several times in the last year and a half as a temp editorial writer. The first two times there were layoffs announced when I was there. And Rich’s suicide. I remember all the bitching and moaning people did during the boom days. I was impressed at the stoicism and professionalism of the dwindling band of survivors.
It’s so damned depressing.
Just to be clear, this is not a pro-labor, anti-Singleton screed. MediaNews inherited a bad situation. True, they’ve made it worse with their inaction. But there would have been layoffs regardless.
The larger issue, in my humble opinion, is that very little thought has been given to *content* and the product itself and how to differentiate it in an increasingly crowded media world. What role does the Merc play in peoples’ lives? You can cut all the deals you want with companies like Yahoo. But if you don’t have a product that people want to buy or use, what’s the point? These are conversations that should have started years ago - in a systematic way - and taken place up and down the food chain, from reporters to editors and publishers and corporate execs.
This is a problem with the whole newspaper industry. But for today, I’m just concerned with the merc.
People tell me I got out just in time (July 1999). I loved working at the Merc. It’s still hard to accept that the paper I loved — hell, the industry I loved — is gone.
Well said, Michael. When I was laid off in Dec. 2006, a few people said maybe I was one of the lucky ones. Maybe I was.
Pete Carey, the Merc’s survivor, has a short story saying 20 newsroom and 30 non-news employees are leaving. Steve Wright is out as edit page editor; Barbara Marshman is taking over. Rebecca Salner is out as business editor.
Here it is:
“The Mercury News cut 50 jobs Friday through a combination of layoffs and buyouts, and named new business and editorial page editors to replace managers who accepted buyouts.
Barbara J. Marshman, associate editor, will replace Stephen E. Wright as editorial page editor. She is the first woman to hold that job at the Mercury News.
Deputy business editor Stephen R. Trousdale replaces Rebecca Salner as business editor.”
I agree with a lot of what you have said here, Michael, and will add that I think the Knight-Ridder way of doing things was a big problem. The focus became careerism among managers who wouldn’t know a reader if they tripped over one at Il Fornaio. For the silliest of reasons — professional and intellectual snobbery — too many editorial managers lost track of what readers actually want. The Merc became irrelevant to too many of its readers. The Merc did a lot of great stuff when at its best, though, and it was a good experience for me to be a part of it for so long. It was great to work with so many talented people.
“The Merc became irrelevant to too many of its readers”
When much of it is straight from the wire services or has fluff on the front page, they have nobody to blame but themselves for this being too true.
SF Cron is no better these days, time to say hello to the NY Times?
It’s remarkable to me how starry-eyed otherwise cynical journalists can be about their own business. This sort of thing has nothing to do with vision or relevance to readers or what the damn’ front page looks like or anything of that sort. It has to do with the corporate bottom line - nothing else. Do you really suppose the stockholders would be moved to not make these massive cuts if they were told “Yes, profits are down at the moment, but the editors have a vision for this paper and here it is”? Corporations care only about the immediate bottom line - the only answer they want to hear is “profits are up this quarter.” That a newspaper degrades from a community’s voice and mirror to a piece of pointless, unvetted, bloglike crap, or that scores (or, nationwide, thousands) of dedicated middle class people are out of a job that used to mean something not just to them but to the community and the country as a whole, is nothing to the stockholders as long as they see that additional .0001 percent increase of profits in their portfolio.
There’s nothing starry eyed about a newspaper being relevant to its community. That’s what sells newspapers, which is what sells advertising, which is what pays the bills. Which is what makes for that .0001 percent increase in portfolios.
[...] Michael Bazeley, Former Merc staffer [...]
Editorial did not fail the Merc. Stop beating yourselves up!
It’s the revenue side that failed the Merc, not editorial. For 13 years I was one of many classified managers who couldn’t count the money fast enough. The worst advertising decisions were made starting with Careerbuilder to ignoring Craigslist instead of crushing it when they had a chance. When you go from $125 million a year in employment classified revenue to $18 million a year, bad things happen. And the first ones to lose jobs are not revenue producing departments. Its editorial.
I laugh at the scenario that $10 million could pay for the staff of an online product (in initial blog here)…that would not even pay for the healthcare for the online staff, the sales staff, the executive staff, the HR staff, the accounting department, and also pay the light bill. Or do you think only reporters get a pay check?
The advertising side failed and not because of economy. They got greedy, they got arrogant and they are the ones who lost track of the fact that their employment classifieds was the golden goose. I could list 10 ways they blocked money from coming in the door, good money that paid those 400 people in editorial and paid the light bill and everything else.
While moving ahead editorially and servicing the changing public should be attended too, it was not editorial that failed. Advertising management failed in their core job, bringing in the dough.
Stop beating your self up editorial. The Merc ran out of money and ways to make money and its their own fault. It never had to happen. The easiest thing in the world is to increase Classified revenue, the highest profit revenue of a newspaper.
Janet, thanks for your comments. Very insightful.
Regarding my back-of-envelope cost-estimates, I’m already setting aside $10 m for administration and sales. The other $10 m is for editorial. I’m also assuming that this operation would be run like a start-up, not a legacy media company. Payroll is outsourced. HR is outsourced. There is no “executive staff.” The office space leased.
I’m not saying the numbers would pencil out. I don’t know if they would. I’m saying it would be intriguing to look at starting over from scratch.
My mom finally canceled her subscription to the Merc. She’d been a loyal subscriber for ages but finally decided it was no longer worth it. Full of wire service copy she can get on her Yahoo page via AT&T DSL, and nothing really covering anything in her area.
I used to buy the merc at the newsstands - no more. Why should I pay 50 cents for a half-assed paper that gives free space to a millionaire that sued them and calls it “public service?”
Screw ‘em. If they want to have a paper made by outsourced labor and cheap interns, that’s fine. I sure as hell don’t have to pay for it, though.
Michael, if its so easy to start the Merc all over with online version only, well why then doesn’t that union get organized and strike the place and start up their own news service. Management is making a mockery of the union, everyone is so scared to lose their job and it seems management has done a great job in divding up even office space so there is no unity. The old game, united we stand, divided we fall is in play. The idea that management is “trying” to break the union is not true. It is already broken and limping along with everyone wondering if they can make it till retirement.
Oh I know…what a scary word STRIKE is. Where is line drawn between laying off for economic reasons and turning a place upside down in order to gain control? What does it take for a union to take action anymore?
Janet: Well, for one, if memory serves, you can’t just strike willy nilly. You need to be negotiating a new contract and for negotiations to have failed. But secondly, what leverage does the union have? Very little as I see it.
This just makes me want to cry…
I grew up reading the Merc, befriended the many staffers and editors while in college at San Jose State University and dreamed of walking into that newsroom one day as a staffer… but now… now I’m not soo sure… it’s not what it was, it’ll never become what it could be, it’s just no longer a top tier paper… my worst fears have come true… Ceppos was right, he was soo right…
Damn it, ima just say it, FUCK YOU Knight Ridder stockholders!!! Is this what you wanted?!
Shaminder: KR stock would be trading at $14 a share today if it was lucky. They sold it in the mid-50s. Hard to argue selling when they had the chance was a bad thing, given what has happened since then.
“There’s nothing starry eyed about a newspaper being relevant to its community. ”
That is not what I said. You missed my point.
Misty-eyed insider’s view for whoever cares: http://www.tommangan.net/index.php/2008/03/11/whats-up-at-the-mercury-news-these-days/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Disease
为什么呢！
What I am seeing is a parallel of the events that have happened here at one of the mcclatchy papers where I (still, for the time being) work.
We lost our union ages ago and its been “frog in the pot of slowly warming water” ever since. I’ve seen people here escorted to the door upon giving resignation — with barely enough time to clean out their desks. I’ve seen our paper shrink from a competing powerhouse to something about the size of what I used to deliver when I lived in a much smaller town.
Although I never worked on the news side I felt that the quality of journalism was such that no other medium (radio, television or otherwise) could come close to touching it.
I think the best we can hope for at this moment is that someone, somewhere out there has a vision that transcends “the bottom line” and can reinvent the printed word and make it relevant to the Children of the Internet before its too late.
Just my two cents.
bt
man, I remember getting dropped off from the carpool after elementary school in the early 90s and picking up that fat afternoon paper to read about (pre-roid) barry bonds, peruse the baseball stats (where else could you find stats in those days?) and calvin and hobbes.
those days are long gone.