Should Yahoo buy a newspaper?

Last week, McClatchy announced it would pay $4.5 billion to acquire newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder. McClatchy also said it planned on selling 12 of the chain's papers, including Silicon Valley's hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News.

Employees of the paper launched a "Save the Merc" campaign to seek a new buyer for the paper, looking to community leaders, and businesspeople.

Now, former Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor is advocating a new plan: Yahoo should buy the paper, along with some others in the chain, "to turn the Bay Area--far and away the best place for this in America--into a living laboratory of tomorrow's journalism."

"Yahoo could become the international test bed for the transition we all know is coming in print journalism. (One place it could start is fulfilling the promise of the under-utilized SiliconValley.com asset that Knight Ridder has failed to nurture.)," Gillmor wrote on his blog. "Again, the shift to online is clearly happening even though papers have some future ahead of them. Yahoo, better than most--if it cared--could help make that transition the kind that honors the reasons we all should care so much about the future of quality journalism. If Silicon Valley and environs aren't the best place in America to start, what is?"

Blog community response:

"The fact that one of the newspapers for sale is in Silicon Valley sounds like a great opportunity for a benevolent software tycoon (or a gang of them) to create the first true 21st century newspaper, publishing online and off, merging professional and amateur content in a pro-am Fourth Estate with ideals of a well-informed community served by a watchdog press."
--Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

"We need a new way to describe people who, like my carpenter and the readers of the San Jose Mercury News, are so engaged by an enterprise or a service or a product that they feel a sense of entitlement to its destiny, and therefore to a role so proactive that it mystifies the nominal owners of the enterprise or service or product."
--Escapable Logic

"However, the Merc, as it's known, has long been a Web pioneer, and I would assume its tech-rich reader base can put up with the idea of them skinnying down a few reporters and possibly going Web-only. With access becoming ubiquitous, and news on the Web being more timely, maybe it's a bunch of noise about nothing."
--Louis Gray Live