Posted on 03/20/2006 3:17:08 AM PST by abb
SAN JOSE, Calif. — When Dan Gillmor first arrived at The San Jose Mercury News in 1994, he recalled, he felt like he was in the "belly of the beast."
Many staff members of The San Jose Mercury News belong to a union, giving the paper higher labor costs that may deter buyers.
In his previous job, as a technology reporter for The Detroit Free Press — then one of the country's leading newspapers — he had trouble getting editors to understand how important the tech story was. Now he was at the center of the most vibrant part of the American economy, where fortunes and history were being made almost every day.
"We were one of the few newspapers that was growing," said Mr. Gillmor, who with a number of other prominent hires to The Mercury News provided some of the best chronicling of the dot-com bubble era.
That bubble burst, but Silicon Valley has come back. The Mercury News, however, has not. Last Monday, the McClatchy Company announced it was buying Knight Ridder in a deal valued at $4.5 billion, but it also said that it would immediately sell 12 of those Knight Ridder papers to help finance the acquisition. The Mercury News, which calls itself "the user manual for Silicon Valley," was to be jettisoned, along with papers in cities like Philadelphia, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Akron, Ohio.
P. Anthony Ridder, the chairman of Knight Ridder, who moved the company's corporate headquarters here from Miami in 1998, a move that reflected the paper's cutting-edge status, expressed shock. "I was just stunned," he was quoted as saying, in a story on the front page of The Mercury News the next day. It was a view shared by nearly everyone at the paper.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Boy, do they have an inflated view of their place in the world.
The Detroit Free Press had trouble comprehending the imporance of technology? Does that simply relate to the general stupidity that permeates Detroit, or does it help explain the recent performance of Ford and GM?
They ain't called the "Dinosaur Media" for nothing, lol...
Waaaah! Craigslist killed our classifieds! Waaah! And now McClatchy bought us but is dumping us right away... I feel so used. Waaah! Nobody wants to buy us cause they're anti-union reactionaries! Waaah! Our display ad columns tanked when the bubble burst... Waaah!
Some one call that paper a Waaahmbulance.
Instead of bitching about Craigslist they could build a better classified site and let people have an ad on the web AND in the paper.
The low suitor count is because businessmen are pro-profit -- they're not directly anti-union, but if your union ain't competitive whose fault is that?
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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