Has the Mercury News changed?

That was the September 8 headline on San Jose Inside. At last count, there were nearly 90 posts in answer to that question, though in truth about half of them seemed to be from two people arguing over who was more hateful and who was more racist.

I certainly have no intention of diving into that well. But I was struck by some of what I read about the paper, and, as the Mercury News’ executive editor, I’d like to address it. I appreciate the invitation from the editor of San Jose Inside to write a guest column to do so.

When you’ve worked at newspapers for 25-plus years, it’s probably unavoidable that you develop a thick skin about what people say about what you do. And at a large paper like ours—with more than 680,000 readers on weekdays, and some 740,000 on Sundays—you hear a lot, some of it positive but, given human nature, more of it not.