[11] First published in 1851, the Mercury News is the last remaining English-language daily newspaper covering the Santa Clara Valley.

[6] The Mercury News's predecessor, the Weekly Visitor, began as a Whig paper in the early 1850s but quickly switched its affiliation to the Democratic Party.

A group of three businessmen led by John C. Emerson bought the papers' presses to found the San Jose Weekly Visitor.

[14] James Jerome Owen – a forty-niner and former Republican New York assemblyman – became the Mercury's publisher in the spring of 1861, later acquiring a controlling interest in the paper along with a partner, Benjamin H.

Tony Ridder placed an emphasis on improving the papers' reportage, to better reflect Knight's reputation for investigative journalism.

In the 1980s, Ridder supported Mayor Tom McEnery's efforts to redevelop the downtown area, including the construction of San Jose Arena and The Tech Museum of Innovation.

In the 1990s, the Mercury News expanded its coverage of the area's ethnic communities, to national acclaim,[41] hiring Vietnamese-speaking reporters for the first time.

[42][43][44][45] A foreign correspondent stationed at the Hanoi bureau held an annual town hall meeting with the Vietnamese-American community in San Jose.

Initially, community members staged protests accusing the paper of siding with the Communist government in Vietnam by opening the bureau.

In 1998, Knight Ridder moved its headquarters from Miami to the Knight-Ridder Building in San Jose, which was seen as an acknowledgment of the central role that online news would play in the company's future.

[55][50] However, on June 12, 2006, federal regulators from the U.S. Department of Justice asked for more time to review the purchase, citing possible antitrust concerns over MediaNews' ownership of other newspapers in the region.

[56] The suit, which sought to undo the purchase of both the Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times, was scheduled to go to trial on April 30, 2007.

While extending until that date a preliminary injunction that prevented the collaboration of local distribution and national advertising sales by the two media conglomerates, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on December 19, 2006, expressed doubt over the legality of the purchase.

[59] In April 2013, MediaNews announced that it would sell the Mercury News campus on Ridder Park Drive in North San Jose.

County Supervisor Dave Cortese approached the Mercury News about moving into the former San Jose City Hall on North First Street,[60] but the paper ended up returning downtown.

[38] According to the publishers, the Ridder Park Drive facility had become unnecessarily large for the paper, following the departure of printing operations and other staff reductions that had occurred over the years.

[61][62][63][12] The Mercury News is the largest tenant in the Towers @ 2nd high-rise office complex in downtown San Jose.

From February 1967 to September 2014, the papers were headquartered in a 36-acre (15 ha) campus in suburban North San Jose, abutting the Nimitz Freeway (then State Route 17, now Interstate 880).

"Mercury News" and "e-Edition" applications are available for Android and iOS devices, as well as for the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook.

The Mercury Center staff comprised both news reporters and business "senders", who posted press releases online in addition to vetted content.

[68] Initially, the service had difficulty attracting users, prompting the paper to add a telephone and fax hotline, News Call, in November 1993.

[50] In August 1996, the Mercury News published "Dark Alliance", a series of investigative articles by reporter Gary Webb that claimed CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking (see § Controversies).

Within days, more than 2,500 websites linked to Mercury Center's "Dark Alliance" section, and the site received 100,000 daily page views over the usual traffic for weeks.

Executive editor Jerome Ceppos eventually distanced the paper from the series, but it continued to receive attention, especially from online conspiracy theorists.

[71] On October 26, 1999, technology columnist Dan Gillmor began writing a blog, eJournal, on the Mercury News' SiliconValley.com website.

Articles dating back to June 1985 can be found online for free on the Mercury News website, with full text available on the NewsLibrary and NewsBank subscription databases.

[76][73] The newspaper has earned several awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1986 for reporting regarding political corruption in the Ferdinand Marcos administration in the Philippines, and one in 1990 for their comprehensive coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

[78] Various staff writers and designers have received awards for their contributions to West magazine, a Sunday insert published by the Mercury News in the 1980s and 1990s.

[79] In August 1996, the Mercury News published "Dark Alliance", a series of investigative articles by reporter Gary Webb.

The series claimed that members of the Nicaraguan Contras, a right wing guerrilla group organized with the help of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been involved in smuggling cocaine into America to support their struggle, and as a result, had played a major role in creating the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.