The Mercury plans to cut back to just three sections, Live, Play, and Innovate. They have cut the Sunday Op-ed section and dropped many columnists. The plan is to further cut back the print version by moving two-thirds of the remaining 200 journalists to the online site, up from the 10% there now.

Executive Editor Carole Leigh Hutton admits that some readers may not be happy with the changes. She says, "Rethinking the newspaper isn't painful. "What's painful is what we've been doing, which is whittling away at the newspaper. It's the death-by-a-thousand-cuts cliche. . . . To simply continue producing the same newspaper is foolhardy. Let's stop shaving, trimming and paring, and do something from scratch."

Matt Mansfield who is running the project admits, “I’m skeptical, and I’m running the project.”

The Mercury has created and editors blog to chronicle the changes at the paper and debate about them. Some of the comments have been very harsh. "This initiative is about feigning interest in what people want," one man wrote. Another comment read "Please bear in mind that there is a 'silent majority' of subscribers in this area who read the Mercury News for what it is -- a daily newspaper. We are not plugged into the Internet 24/7. We don't have devices to read the news, anytime, anywhere -- hell, some of us out here don't even have computers. We really couldn't give a damn about your Web site. You have taken us for granted. This is a huge error on your part."

The biggest complaints have been about the cutback in Sunday comics and the difficulty in finding crossword and Sudoku puzzles.

Could the Mercury be changing everything for nothing? At the present time it is hard for online sites to produce the kind of revenue that would support a large reporting staff.

Hutton explains, "I've been very clear with everyone since I got here: Nothing is guaranteed in the future.”

Source: Washingtonpost.com through Poynter Institute Romenesko