31 employees laid off from Mercury News staff

By Pete Carey
Mercury News
The Mercury News laid off 31 employees from its newsroom staff Monday, blaming declining advertising revenue and a challenging market for newspapers across the country.

An additional 15 newsroom workers have voluntarily resigned in recent weeks. The paper now has a newsroom staff of 200, about half what it was in 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom.

"It's very hard to see this many talented people leave the staff in this way," said Executive Editor Carole Leigh Hutton. "Layoffs are painful, no matter how necessary. But there are still more than 200 dedicated journalists in this newsroom, and it's our opportunity now to guide this newspaper into the future."

The bursting of the dot-com bubble eroded the paper's help-wanted advertising, but a more lasting challenge has been the advent of free online classified advertising.

The Mercury News Web site is one of the Bay Area's most popular Internet news sites, but still brings in only a small part of the paper's total revenue, which has declined 36 percent since 2000.

Sylvia Ulloa, local president of the Newspaper Guild, which represents many newsroom employees, observed that the layoffs fell heavily on Guild members. "This pain should have been shared by everybody in the newsroom, not just the rank-and-file members," she said.

However, Ulloa said the newspaper's managers have told the guild not to expect any more layoffs for the fiscal year, which began Sunday.

Click on the headline for a list of those laid off.