Comments on: Mercury falling

By: Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley » RIP Mercury News

Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley » RIP Mercury News — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 06:03:13 +0000

[...] note: Ryan Sholin and I are both pondering the Merc’s fate this week. Go read him [...]

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:04:25 +0000

I prefer uncluttered to unbundled.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:02:33 +0000

@Tony – Always good to have this conversation with you – I miss it…

The way you read news is unbundled, served by RSS feeds, showing up on your iGoogle page or your reader or your Facebook page, or wherever you want it, right?

The Merc is good enough at serving that audience, but in their market, they simply must do more.

I can get what they offer on technology, politics, and business in a much more targeted way from blogs written by folks who don’t spend any time — I mean zero minutes — worrying about a print news cycle.

When reporters like Dean Takahashi and Matt Marshall left, they took their online audiences with them. I kept reading SiliconBeat – heck, the RSS feed even stayed the same – but the Merc lost me as a niche reader.

And that’s my transition back to arguing against trying to be everything to anyone.

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:59:58 +0000

Sholin, you know that I will pretty much disagree with anything. My one suggestion to make newspapers better is that no matter what story, where it is running or who writes it, it must answer the question “What does this mean to me?”. If it doesn’t answer that question, it shouldn’t run.

As for the Web side of things, I don’t know my NGPS from my Drupal. All I know is how I personally browse the Web. I prefer all my stories in one place. I don’t want to go to 14 different sites to get my national news and I don’t only care about local. I want national and world stories on the front page because sometimes they are a bigger deal to me than what a neighborhood is named.

And you know how I feel about user-generated content. My head is hurting already.

PS: You know that I’m kind of a tech-head, but I do not click on video links. There are too many player types and the loading time (even with my fast connection) is too long. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. I want insightful and in depth from newspapers. I’ll leave the brief video clips or podcasts to the TV and radio stations (not that I’ll ever click on them).

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:14:13 +0000

@Lil Mike –

Everyone has their ideas about a mix of local and national news. Personally, I believe in local news. I get national/international news from 14 different sources before I come close to seeing a print edition front page.

By: Lil Mike in SF

Lil Mike in SF — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 01:07:10 +0000

I find your post to have it’s merits, and also am depressed, if not disgusted by the decline in newspapers around the Bay Area. To be frank, newspapers in the homebase of Hearst’s yellow journalism empire have always been a weak link, and the Merc was the only regional bright spot in a sea of dimbulbs. Your suggestion that the Merc delegate major national news stories as back page fodder is silly though. If the Merc was to become a neighborhood blog as you suggest, it’s rep would erode further, revenue would wither even more, and daily purpose would likely be further watered down.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:02:13 +0000

Great post and very good suggestions, Ryan. While the 1-5 list isn’t as easy to implement for such a large site as it might sound, I think it’s a start — and potentially a new beginning — if such measures are taken as a mirror of the existing site on an internal & limited beta sandbox.

By: Michael Bazeley

Michael Bazeley — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 07:24:02 +0000

My thoughts are here: http://www.bazeley.net/blog/?p=78

By: camccune

camccune — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:10:15 +0000

It’s dispiriting to watch the Merc slowly dissipate. I’ll be interested to see if you hear from some current and past MN reporters.

BTW, I see your GHM boss Owen is getting some major flack on that job posting you listed in the previous post (Work with Us, People). Lots of anxiety out there. Amazed me that one person was asking about job security. I’d have thought that it was pretty clear by now there’s no such thing in the news biz.