Newspapers of the Future

The San Jose Mercury News is one of the newspapers left dangling by the acquisition of the Knight-Ridder chain by McClatchy Co., and blogger Dan Gillmor, proprietor of The Bayosphere, is not amused.  Gillmor writes of attempts to “Save the Merc” by allowing the staff and some community-minded investors to buy the paper and run it, and in so doing, transform the business model for newspapers, a change that has been a long time coming.  Gillmor suggests that Yahoo might be a buyer, and could turn the Merc into a “living laboratory of tomorrow’s journalism.”  Gillmor adds: “Yahoo is also competing on a journalistic level, which is different than most other business rivals – moving into news in a fairly big way, including the bottom-up kinds of citizen-generated stuff that I believe, more than ever, are essential to the future of newspaper franchises.”  Jay Rosen of Press Think also fulminates on this subject.