The San Jose Mercury News is about to make a series of sectioning changes largely focused on the newspaper’s arts and entertainment and feature sections.

These changes will begin next Monday and are part of a building-wide effort to reduce expenses in response to an error in the newsroom salary budget.

Here are the changes, as I currently understand them:

Monday

There will no longer be an Arts and Entertainment section. Comics and some other small amount of newshole will move into the Local section. Charlie McCollum’s Monday TV column will move to Tuesday.

Classified will be combined with the Sports section.

Tuesday

The Arts and Entertainment section will be renamed SV Life Arts and Entertainment.

Wednesday

The Arts and Entertainment section and Food section will be combined into one section called SV Life Food and Wine.

Thursday

The TV + Comics section will be eliminated. The content from that section will be moved into the eye section.

Friday

The Arts and Entertainment section will be renamed SV Life Movies.

Saturday

The Arts and Entertainment section will be combined with the House and Home section and renamed SV Home and Garden.

Sunday

No changes have been announced.

These changes are significant but they are not enough to solve the budget problems revealed in the last couple of weeks. Because of that I suspect more changes will become apparent as each day’s paper rolls out next week.

Your comments on the Mercury News
About a half dozen people have responded to my request for people to give me their impressions of how the Mercury News has changed in the last year or so. Several of these comments are detailed and thoughtful. I appreciate the effort people put into them.

A couple of others fall into the broad category of “the Mercury News mostly just sucks these days.” I plan to push back a bit on these and ask people to be more specific.

If you have thoughts about the current state of the Mercury News feel free to pass them on. I plan to compile all of this and send it out to the group by early next week.

In case you missed it, here is how I initially asked for your thoughts:

How do you think the paper has changed, from a reader’s perspective, compared to the summer of 2006 when the sale was completed? I’ll compile any answers and pass them on.

A couple of pleas:
•Please do not turn this into an anti Dean Singleton rant. I am sorry to see the changes (I have noted in my previous blog) but that does not mean I disagree with the motivation behind them. Had the folks at Knight Ridder taken some of these tough steps the company might still be around.
•Refrain from general comments like “The Mercury News mostly just sucks” or “The Mercury News is a crummy liberal rag.” I am interested in the kinds of changes that a thoughtful reader would notice.
•If you think some of the changes have improved the newspaper please include those. I am not a sports fan. But I am vaguely aware that some of the Sports coverage the SJMN gets from the other Singleton papers in NorCal is pretty valuable to sports fans.