Neal and Stan, this post is not about sports. It’s about journalism. I warn you up front because I don’t want to misrepresent this post, which I write with sadness and passion.

I take two actual paper newspapers at home — the SF Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune. I love the feel of a paper and I learn more reading a paper instead of reading online and I wish I could get the Santa Rosa Press Democrat delivered to my door but I live 60 miles away. This morning, for no particular reason, I looked at the front page of the Trib, saw the big OAKLAND TRIBUNE name. And then my eyes wandered below the big type and in much smaller type I read, to my horror, “an edition of the San Jose Mercury News.”

Good grief. The Trib used to be quite a paper. It had a big circulation and when I worked at the Chron, 1979-1994, we competed head on with the Trib in sports. God, that was fun. We went up against big-deal writers and columnists, Dave Newhouse, Nick Peters, Ron Bergman, Ralph Wiley (RIP). The “we” was me and Ira Miller and Glenn Dickey and Ron Thomas and other home-run hitters. The competition in journalism was fierce and fun and friendly. I loved the Trib and I loved going up against it.

And now they’re telling me the Trib is an adjunct of the Merc, that Oakland doesn’t even rate its own paper, that San Jose which would like to steal Oakland’s teams, is producing Oakland’s paper. I am not saying the Merc is doing anything wrong or skewing its news vis a vis the teams and where they want to be. I’m saying it’s sad when the Trib becomes the junior varsity of the Merc, and its’ sad when the landmark Trib building in downtown Oakland no longer houses the Trib which inhabits one floor in a building over by the Coliseum.

The Oakland Tribune is an edition of the San Jose Mercury News — good grief.