The Mercury News (formerly San Jose Mercury News; often locally known as The Merc) is a morning daily newspaper published in San Jose, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is published by the Bay Area News Group, a subsidiary of Media News Group which in turn is controlled by Alden Global Capital, a vulture fund. In March 2013, it was the fifth largest daily newspaper in the United States, with a daily circulation of 611,194. In 2018, the paper had a circulation of 324,500 daily and 415,200 on Sundays. The Bay Area News Group no longer reports circulation, but rather "readership". , readership of 312,700 adults daily was reported.

First published in 1851, the Mercury News is the last remaining English-language daily newspaper covering the Santa Clara Valley in Northern California. It became the Mercury News in 1983 after a series of mergers. During much of the 20th century, it was owned by Knight Ridder. Because of its location in Silicon Valley, the Mercury News has covered many of the key events in the history of information technology and computing, and was a pioneer in delivering news online.

Name

thumb|left|The New Almaden mercury mine near San Jose

The paper's name derives from the San Jose Mercury and San Jose News, two daily newspapers that merged to form the Mercury News.

The San Jose Mercurys name was a play on words. The word "mercury" was often found in newspaper titles, but here it also alluded to the importance of the mercury industry during the California Gold Rush (1848–55) when the paper was first created (1851). At the time, the nearby New Almaden mine (now Almaden Quicksilver County Park) was North America's largest producer of mercury, which was needed for hydraulic gold mining. In addition, Mercury is the Roman messenger god as well as the god of commerce and thieves—he is known for his swiftness—so the name Mercury is commonly used for newspapers without the quicksilver association.

Coverage

The paper's local coverage and circulation is concentrated in Santa Clara County and San Mateo County. With the Mercury News, East Bay Times, Marin Independent Journal, and Silicon Valley Community Newspapers, the Bay Area News Group covers much of the San Francisco Bay Area with the notable exception of San Francisco itself. The paper remained a conservative voice through the mid 20th century, when it supported pro-growth city leaders and pursued a staunchly pro-growth, anti-union agenda. It became considerably more moderate in the 1970s, reflecting new ownership and changes to the local political landscape. It endorsed John B. Anderson for president in 1980 and endorsed Democratic presidential candidates in every election from 1992 through 2016.

History

Early history

The newspaper now known as the Mercury News began in 1851 or 1852. California legislators had just moved the state capital from San Jose to Vallejo, leading to the failure of San Jose's first two newspapers, the Argus and State Journal. A group of three businessmen led by John C. Emerson bought the papers' presses to found the San Jose Weekly Visitor. W. A. Slocum assumed control of the Telegraph in 1860 and merged it with the San Jose Mercury or Weekly Mercury to become the Telegraph and Mercury. William N. Slocum soon dropped Telegraph from the name. By this point, the Mercury was one of two newspapers publishing in San Jose. and again from March 11, 1872, after the purchase of the Daily Guide.

The Mercury merged with the Times Publishing Company, which was owned by Charles M. Shortridge, in 1884. The Daily Morning Times and Daily Mercury briefly became the Times-Mercury, while the Weekly Times and Weekly Mercury briefly become the Times-Weekly Mercury. In 1885, both publications adopted the San Jose Mercury name. That year, Owen sold his interest in the paper and moved to San Francisco. In 1913, the two papers were consolidated into a single morning paper, the San Jose Mercury Herald.

In 1942, the Mercury Herald Company purchased the San Jose News (which was founded in 1851) but continued to publish both papers, the Mercury Herald in the morning and the News in the evening, with a combined Sunday edition called the Mercury Herald News.

Ridder ownership

Herman Ridder's Northwest Publications (later Ridder Publications) purchased the Mercury and News in 1952. During the mid 20th century, the papers took largely conservative, pro-growth positions. Publisher Joe Ridder was a vocal proponent of San Jose City Manager A. P. Hamann's development agenda, which emphasized urban sprawl within an ever-expanding city limits. Ridder counted on increasing population to lead to increased newspaper subscriptions and advertising sales. The paper supported a series of general obligation bonds worth $ (equivalent to $ in ), most of it spent on capital improvements that benefited real estate developers. It also supported a revision to the city charter that introduced a direct mayoral elections and abolished the vote of confidence for city manager. By 1967, the Mercury had risen to rank among the top six largest morning newspapers in the country by circulation, boosted by unabated growth into the suburbs, while the News ran the most advertising of any evening newspaper in the country.

Knight Ridder ownership

In 1974, Ridder merged with Knight Newspapers to form Knight Ridder. Joe Ridder was forced to retire in 1977. His nephew, P. Anthony "Tony" Ridder, succeeded him as publisher. Tony Ridder placed an emphasis on improving the papers' reportage, to better reflect Knight's reputation for investigative journalism. The afternoon edition was discontinued in 1995, leaving only the morning edition. hiring Vietnamese-speaking reporters for the first time. A foreign correspondent stationed at the Hanoi bureau held an annual town hall meeting with the Vietnamese-American community in San Jose. Initially, community members staged protests accusing the paper of siding with the Communist government in Vietnam by opening the bureau.

thumb|right|Logo of Viet Mercury from 1999 to 2005

The Mercury News launched the free, Spanish-language weekly (New World) in 1996 and the free, Vietnamese-language weekly Viet Mercury in 1999. Viet Mercury was the first Vietnamese-language newspaper published by an English-language daily.

Growth alongside the technology industry

The Mercury News benefited from its status as the major daily newspaper in Silicon Valley during the dot-com bubble. It led the news industry in business coverage of the valley's high-tech industry, attracting readers from around the world. Time called the Mercury News the most technologically savvy newspaper in the country.

The Mercury News was one of the first daily newspapers in the United States to have an online presence, and was the first to deliver full content and breaking news online. It launched a service called Mercury Center on America Online in 1993, followed by the country's first news website in 1995 (see ). Mercury Center shut down its AOL service in July 1996, leaving only the website.

thumb|right|upright|The Mercury Newss parent company was headquartered at the Knight-Ridder Building in downtown San Jose from 1998 to 2006.

At its peak in 2001, the Mercury News had 400 employees in its newsroom, 15 bureaus, $288 million in annual revenue, and profit margins above 30%. In 1998, Knight Ridder moved its headquarters from Miami to the Knight-Ridder Building in San Jose, which was seen as an acknowledgment of the central role that online news would play in the company's future. Mercury Center ended its paywall in May 1998, after posting 1.2  million monthly unique visitors the previous year. By 2000, the paper had a Sunday circulation of 327,000 and $341 million in annual revenue, $118 million of it from job listings.

Although approval by regulators and completion of MediaNews' acquisition was announced on August 2, 2006, a lawsuit claiming antitrust violations by MediaNews and the Hearst Corporation had also been filed in July 2006. On April 25, 2007, days before the trial was scheduled to begin, the parties reached a settlement in which MediaNews preserved its acquisitions. The Mercury News and Contra Costa Times were placed under CNP's local subsidiary, the Bay Area News Group. Meanwhile, layoffs continued at the Mercury News. Around December 2016, 101 employees were laid off, including 40 in the newsroom. In April 2013, MediaNews announced that it would sell the Mercury News campus on Ridder Park Drive in North San Jose. County Supervisor Dave Cortese approached the Mercury News about moving into the former San Jose City Hall on North First Street, but the paper ended up returning downtown. In June 2014, printing and production of the Mercury News and other daily newspapers moved to Bay Area News Group's Concord and Hayward facilities. The Mercury News moved into a downtown office building that September. Business functions occupy the seventh floor of 4 North Second Street, while news staff and executives occupy the eighth floor, for a total of .

thumb|left|The original Mercury Center service on America Online. Despite the popularity of premium features such as the "News Library", Mercury Center gave more prominence to content from the print paper, such as news and sports headlines. Readers could enter alphanumeric codes, which appeared throughout the print paper, to quickly access online versions of articles that did not make print. Examples included for an article in the news section or for a press release in the business section. The Mercury Center staff comprised both news reporters and business "senders", who posted [[press releases online in addition to vetted content.

Initially, the service had difficulty attracting users, prompting the paper to add a telephone and fax hotline, News Call, in November 1993. By early 1994, Mercury Center had added 5,100 subscribers to AOL, representing less than 20% of AOL's 30,000 subscribers in the San Francisco Bay Area or less than two percent of the Mercury Newss 282,488 daily subscribers.

In December 1994, the Mercury News began beta-testing a companion website, Mercury Center Web, Subscribers no longer needed AOL to access the Mercury Newss online content, and the paper no longer had to share advertising revenue with AOL.

On October 26, 1999, technology columnist Dan Gillmor began writing a blog, eJournal, on the Mercury News SiliconValley.com website. It is believed to have been the first blog by a journalist at a traditional media company. In the 2000s, he was joined by columnists-turned-bloggers Tim Kawakami and John Paczkowski.

Articles dating back to June 1985 can be found online for free on the Mercury News website, with full text available on the NewsLibrary and NewsBank subscription databases. NewsBank also hosts the full text of articles from 1886 to 1922. The San José Public Library's website hosts thousands of news clips of articles from 1920 to 1979. Much of Gillmor's eJournal is preserved on the Bayosphere website. The Mercury News was also named one of the five best-designed newspapers in the world by the Society for News Design for work done in 2001. In 2007 the newspaper won a Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Award for General Excellence, Class IV.

Various staff writers and designers have received awards for their contributions to West magazine, a Sunday insert published by the Mercury News in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Mercury News website received EPpy Awards in 1996, 1999, 2009, 2013, and 2014.

Controversies

In August 1996, the Mercury News published "Dark Alliance", a series of investigative articles by reporter Gary Webb. The series claimed that members of the Nicaraguan Contras, a right wing guerrilla group organized with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been involved in smuggling cocaine into America to support their struggle, and as a result, had played a major role in creating the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. The series sparked three federal investigations, but other newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times later published articles alleging that the series' claims were overstated. Executive editor Jerry Ceppos, who had approved the series, eventually published a column that suggested shortcomings in the series' reporting, editing, and production, while maintaining the story was correct "on many important points". The series was turned into a 1998 book by the same name, also by Webb, and an account of the controversy surrounding the series was published as Kill the Messenger in 2006. Both were the basis for the 2014 film Kill the Messenger.

Notable people

  • Lamberto Alvarez artist
  • Scott Apel Mercury News movie columnist; science fiction writer
  • Dwight Bentel Mercury Herald reporter
  • Ryan Blitstein Mercury News business reporter; nonprofit executive
  • Howard Bryant technology and sports reporter
  • Ric Bucher Mercury News beat writer; radio basketball analyst
  • Stephen Butler financial columnist
  • Lou Cannon reporter
  • John Canzano sports columnist
  • Pete Carey Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter
  • Denis Collins reporter
  • Tim Cowlishaw sportswriter
  • Penny De Los Santos photographer
  • Diana Diamond editorial writer
  • Hannah Dreier reporter
  • Sandra Eisert Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer and West art director
  • Katherine Ellison Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter
  • Steve Fainaru investigative reporter
  • Dan Gillmor technology columnist and blogger
  • Susan Goldberg Mercury News managing editor; magazine editor
  • Pedro Gomez baseball writer
  • Minal Hajratwala Mercury News journalist; writer and queer rights activist
  • Jay T. Harris Mercury News chairman and publisher
  • Everis A. Hayes Mercury Herald publisher and proprietor; Republican congressman from California
  • David E. Hoffman reporter
  • David Cay Johnston reporter
  • Tim Kawakami sports columnist
  • Jeffrey Bruce Klein West editor-in-chief; investigative reporter
  • Robert Lindsey Mercury News reporter; crime author
  • Steve Lopez staff writer
  • Michael S. Malone technology reporter
  • Gerald Nachman Mercury television reviewer
  • Hoang Xuan Nguyen Viet Mercury managing editor; South Vietnamese author
  • James Jerome Owen Mercury publisher; Republican New York assemblyman and California assemblyman
  • Sal Pizarro Around Town, Cocktail Chronicles columnist
  • Michael Rezendes reporter
  • James Herbert (Bert) Robinson Pulitzer Prize-winning Senior Editor
  • Lewis M. Simons Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter
  • Susan Slusser baseball writer
  • Rebecca Smith reporter
  • Timothy Taylor opinion columnist
  • Philip Trounstine political writer and editor
  • Gary Webb investigative reporter
  • Leigh Weimers Community columnist
  • Troy Wolverton technology columnist
  • David Yarnold Mercury News senior vice president; environmentalist

Community weeklies

The Mercury News publishes the following community weeklies:

  • Almaden Resident
  • Cambrian Resident
  • Campbell Reporter
  • Cupertino Courier
  • Los Gatos Weekly
  • Rose Garden Resident
  • Saratoga News
  • Sunnyvale Sun
  • Willow Glen Resident
  • Peninsula News
  • The Milpitas Post

See also

  • List of newspapers in California
  • San Jose Mercury News West Magazine
  • Viet Mercury

Notes

References

Further reading

  • [http://www.sjsu.edu/polisci/docs/faculty_links/Terry%20Political%20History%20since1970%201.pdf] Excerpted from
  • SiliconValley.com
  • San Jose Telegraph and Santa Clara Register front page, February 15, 1854[http://historysanjose.pastperfectonline.com/library/043A90C9-B2FC-4EE1-8769-759370163106]
  • wikisource:en:California Historical Society Quarterly/Volume 22/The San Jose Mercury and the Civil War