The end was inevitable for the Murky-News when MediaNews bought it a few years back, along with every other newspaper in the Bay Area except the SF Chronicle. MediaNews is known as a corporate bulldozer; its MO is to buy up all the papers in a metropolitan area, lay off most of the staff, consolidate functions (like sending a reporter who used to cover municipal affairs on the Peninsula over to the East Bay to cover a murder), and outsource as much as possible. Editing is currently performed in a plant in Pleasanton, but there's been talk of outsourcing editing to India. I'm pretty sure the headlines are already being written in Bangalore: They seem to be in English, but often don't parse to anything meaningful.

MediaNews is also wellknown for its unabashedly rightwing political stance. That's been problemmatical for the Murky, as a major paper in a strongly Liberal area, but they haven't tried to push it that far. But it was tragic that their very first move editorially after buying the paper was to kill the Sunday Opinion section. That was before their present financial problems, so it was a purely political move. I'd say politics was, at most, a minor strain in their problems.

Speaking of financial problems, the cherry on the cake is that MediaNews filed for bankruptcy in January, and it went through last week. They tried to spin it as a proforma paperwork reshuffling, but that has no credibility, considering the obvious distress that you and everybody else can plainly see. Price is up to 75 cents at the newstand, content is less than a tenth what it once was, junk advertising is way up as they desperately slash ad rates...that's a paper in its final death throes.

The San Jose Mercury-News and their corporate parent are circling the drain. The end is near.