SAN JOSE — The San Jose Mercury News, founded a year after California became a state, awoke Monday to an uncertain future, a victim of the very trends it had meticulously chronicled.
The announcement by McClatchy Co. that it would sell the Mercury News and 11 other newspapers after the Sacramento-based company takes over Knight Ridder Inc. showed how the newspaper's prospects had plummeted. It was only eight years ago that Knight Ridder moved its corporate headquarters from Miami -- where the chain's Miami Herald is published -- to San Jose.
The cross-country shift was a declaration of faith in Knight Ridder's high-tech future. "There is no doubt that new technology and the emerging power of the Internet will greatly affect how people will get their news and information," Chief Executive Tony Ridder said then. "As a news and information company, we want to stay very close to developments related to this new medium."
At the time, the Internet was being harnessed in the garages, universities and low-slung office parks just north of here. Yet instead of riding the digital age, the Mercury News, a fixture of this city since 1851, appears to have missed its chance.
In significant numbers, readers and advertisers have been abandoning it, as they have just about every newspaper, for new forms of news and entertainment. Yahoo and Google and Craigslist rule now.
And just when salvation, or at least stability, seemed at hand in the form of the McClatchy chain, that buyer decided it saw no future in the Mercury News and announced that it would be putting it on the block.
Newspaper offices tend to be emotional places, and intense feelings were in evidence at the Mercury News on Monday.
Dismay was at the forefront. "Not a cheerful place today," summarized sportswriter David Pollak. McClatchy's swift rejection of the Mercury News was taken as a vote of no confidence, a declaration of non-viability.
"We thought it would be the Mercury News forever," said Andrea Lema, a longtime veteran of the advertising department. "You would say, 'I work at the Mercury News,' and everyone would know what that meant. We were such a huge part of the community. We were the community.
"Now," she concluded sadly, "we're orphans."
How had things come to this point?
The paper had certainly evolved over the decades. It started as the San Jose Weekly Visitor, eventually to be remade as the Mercury. The San Jose News was born in 1883. In 1943, the Mercury company bought the News.
