The San Jose Mercury News, my employer for more than a decade, was an early innovator in online news. The Mercury News was online before most newspapers established news websites. In 1993, the Mercury News launched Mercury Center in a partnership with America Online. Readers paid $9.95 a month for access to AOL and an expanded menu of news content that wasn’t available in the print newspaper. Just two years later, after the introduction of the Netscape browser, Mercury Center moved to the Internet.
With its technology-savvy readership in Silicon Valley, the Mercury News should have been a leader in the transition from print to digital news. A lengthy article this month in the Columbia Journalism Review examined why that didn’t happen—identifying mistakes by management at the Mercury News and the newspaper’s former parent company, Knight Ridder.
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