Mercury News | Jim Romenesko | Gawker | Washington City Paper
Digital First Media’s Mercury News Group will sell its 36-acre campus — part of DFM’s plan to reduce “legacy infrastructure costs,” Pete Carey reports.
The campus, visible from Interstate 880 in North San Jose behind a grove of olive trees and an expanse of lawn, has been home to the Mercury News since February 1967. At that time, the editorial staff moved from the paper’s old downtown San Jose plant to a spacious headquarters at 750 Ridder Park Drive. Planning for the move began in 1965, and new presses were installed in November 1966.
Printing will move to Bay Area News Group East Bay, Carey reports. The company will eliminate production jobs in San Jose. Publisher Mac Tully tells Carey the newsroom and ad and business staffs “will be relocated somewhere in Silicon Valley.”
The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., announced the sale of its building to the County of Riverside Monday. “Why have any private business at all in a dreary downtown of mile-wide empty streets and bankruptcy courthouses?” Ken Layne writes in Gawker, noting that the Press-Enterprise just won “24 awards, including three first-place honors, in the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s 2012 Better Newspaper Contest.”
The Washington Post announced in February it would explore a sale of its headquarters. Publisher Katharine Weymouth said Wednesday the news org is looking for something in either Washington, D.C., or its Virginia suburbs, Aaron Wiener reports.
Previously:
Weymouth said she’s looking “primarily” at D.C. and Virginia—the latter having been home to the paper’s digital side during the ill-fated experiment at splitting the paper’s operations that ended in 2009. “We’d like it to be cheap, and near the Capitol, near the courthouses,” she said.
Previously: The latest on new HQs for NPR, Miami Herald and Washington Post | It’s a trend: Newspaper buildings are worth selling
