Bay Area News Group


Bay Area News Group is the largest publisher of daily and weekly newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including its flagship The Mercury News. A subsidiary of the Denver-based MediaNews Group, its corporate headquarters is in San Ramon, California, and publication offices in San Jose and Walnut Creek, although the Walnut Creek location was scheduled to be closed under a 2011 restructuring. Previously known as ANG, the name changed to Bay Area News Group in 2006 after the MediaNews Group bought The Mercury News and Contra Costa Times from McClatchy Co. Most production aspects have now moved to The Mercury News facilities in San Jose, California.

Print

The structure allows the company to share stories between its various newspapers, meaning one reporter can get the story for all the publications.
BANG publishes three daily newspapers:
BANG's newspapers collectively cover the East Bay, South Bay, Peninsula, and Marin County. It has beat reporters covering San Jose and Oakland but none for San Francisco, where it cedes coverage here to the San Francisco Chronicle, its main competitor. On the other hand, the Chronicle doesn't cover the South Bay as BANG does via The Mercury News. BANG's only coverage in the North Bay is Marin County.

2011 restructuring

On August 23, 2011, the company announced the reorganization of 11 of its newspapers, with shuttering of all of its East Bay nameplates under two new publications as of November 2, 2011. The planned merger and publication reorganization was modified in October 2011, when BANG decided to scrap plans to launch the East Bay Tribune and instead consolidate its East Bay newspapers under the Oakland Tribune name.
In March 2016, BANG announced it would further consolidate its newspapers down to two: The East Bay Times and The Mercury News, eliminating the Oakland Tribune and the other papers.