Can This Newspaper Be Saved? Reinventing the San Jose Mercury News

Implications: All newspapers need to recognize and respond to the changing information needs of their geographic and demographic constituencies. If the Merc's transparent reinvention process succeeds, other newspapers will want to emulate it -- fast.

Analysis: The San Jose Mercury News is attempting a bold reinvention.  And it’s doing it with an unusual degree of transparency.  Why?

First, its newsroom has been cut in half over the past few years.  Second, it has been sold twice in 20 months, by Knight-Ridder and McClatchy and is now owned by Media News.  Third, it recognizes that the main community it serves -- Silicon Valley –- doesn’t exactly represent the best future market for a dead-tree, ink-on-paper product.

Rather than continue the “death by a thousand cuts” process, the Merc is committed to figuring out a future that consists of a more focused (and cheaper to produce), more useful daily paper, plus a beefed up website that it hopes will keep it relevant and essential in the lives of its community. And it’s documenting the project online at: http://www.mercurynewsphoto.com/rethink/

In the words of the Merc’s Matt Mansfield the goal is create a print-online combination that becomes: “the meeting point of the larger conversation the community is having about itself.”

So far, the effort has produced the full gamut of reader responses.  On one end, the “traditionalists” complain loudest about how the Crossword and Sudoku puzzles keep switching pages.  On the other, Silicon Valley leaders, when given a preview of the newspaper’s (self-perceived) radical redesign, told editors they didn’t see much difference.

So, can this newspaper be saved?  The new paper is expected to debut early next year.  Hopefully, it will reflect smart editorial and design decisions that other papers can learn from.  Ideally, these decisions will have been made after the paper’s open dialogue with their reader and opinion-leader community.

However this plays out, it’s worth watching this effort closely. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a new model to show us what the print paper can and should be, and, equally important, what it can no longer hope to be.  A paper that remains or becomes a must-read because it gives readers more of what they need from the paper –- and less of what they are already getting elsewhere.