CNet Forum: Web Guru Gilmor Wants Yahoo to Buy 'Mercury News' (Dinosaur Media Extinction Alert)

Editor & Publisher ^ | March 20, 2006 | Staff

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Published: March 20, 2006 12:09 PM ET

"Should Yahoo buy a newspaper?" That's how Blogma at Cnet.com kicked off an online discussion today, referencing a proposal by former San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gilmor on his own blog. That paper was among the 12 that McClatchy has put up for sale after securing them in the proposed purchase of Knight Ridder.

Yahoo should buy the paper, along with some others in the chain, "to turn the Bay Area -- far and away the best place for this in America -- into a living laboratory of tomorrow's journalism," Gilmore wrote. "Yahoo could become the international test bed for the transition we all know is coming in print journalism. (One place it could start is fulfilling the promise of the under-utilized SiliconValley.com asset that Knight Ridder has failed to nurture.) Again, the shift to online is clearly happening even though papers have some future ahead of them. Yahoo, better than most -- if it cared -- could help make that transition the kind that honors the reasons we all should care so much about the future of quality journalism. If Silicon Valley and environs aren't the best place in America to start, what is?"

Blogma is posting the "blog community" response. Here are the first three examples:

"The fact that one of the newspapers for sale is in Silicon Valley sounds like a great opportunity for a benevolent software tycoon (or a gang of them) to create the first true 21st century newspaper, publishing online and off, merging professional and amateur content in a pro-am Fourth Estate with ideals of a well-informed community served by a watchdog press." -- Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

"We need a new way to describe people who, like my carpenter and the readers of the San Jose Mercury News, are so engaged by an enterprise or a service or a product that they feel a sense of entitlement to its destiny, and therefore to a role so proactive that it mystifies the nominal owners of the enterprise or service or product." -- Escapable Logic

"However, the Merc, as it's known, has long been a Web pioneer, and I would assume its tech-rich reader base can put up with the idea of them skinnying down a few reporters and possibly going Web-only. With access becoming ubiquitous, and news on the Web being more timely, maybe it's a bunch of noise about nothing." -- Louis Gray Live

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TURN THOSE MACHINES BACK ON!!!!

[ncountylee]

Lets start a Walmart considers buying paper rumor.

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Now I like that idea. ROFLMAO!!

[EasySt]

I must get at least one call a week from both the Mercury News and the SF Chronicle, asking me to accept their papers.

I always tell them that I would be ashamed and embarrassed to have their blatantly anti-American, leftist screed show up on my doorstep, where it could contaminate any innocent young mind that might see it there.

I will therefore continue to vote against their hate speech, their lies, and most importantly their politically calculated omissions and distortions, with my wallet.

I must not be alone, since both of those rags are in increasingly obvious financial "Circling the Drain" mode.