As a Palo Alto native, the Merc has always been important to me since I was a paperboy. When I was an expat abroad in the mid-Nineties, it was the Merc who looked across the net to tell me Good Morning Silicon Valley. Hard to picture the valley without it. Today we may mourn it.
Dan is on to something that the local community should save the paper, even if it takes the form of a local company, or is just an online spinoff.
Aside: remember when the website was the cutting edge of tables?