Mercury News biz reporter leaves to run Web site

San Jose Mercury News business reporter Matt Marshall is leaving the paper on Friday to run VentureBeat, a new Web site devoted to the Silicon Valley community. However, the Mercury News will be a customer of Marshall’s, according to his first post.

In an e-mail, Marshall wrote, “VentureBeat will focus initially on Silicon Valley, and gradually, when possible, expand to cover innovation hubs around the globe.

“VentureBeat’s mission is to provide news and information about private companies and the venture capital that fuels them. People are at the heart of this project. VentureBeat will be a resource for entrepreneurs and other interested professionals facing some the biggest decisions of their careers.”

In his first post on the site, Marshall stated, “My Mercury News colleague Michael Bazeley and I launched SiliconBeat.com almost two years ago, in an effort to respond to the new reality of online media. The blog began as an experiment, taking up an hour or so of my day. Soon, it became much more: Baze and I found ourselves spending several hours daily on a blog that was supposed to be outside of our day jobs at the Merc. Baze, showing more sanity, pulled back from SiliconBeat and has taken a job managing the Mercury News’ Web site. For me, SiliconBeat continued as a labor of love, a way to filter the goings-on of this fascinating place we call Silicon Valley. Yet I was doing too much. So I approached the Mercury News, and told them I wanted to go out on my own.

“To my delight, the Mercury News has become my first customer. It will syndicate the content I produce here. It has the right to run it in the paper, and to put it on their Web site. For me, it is a great deal. The Merc is the valley’s paper of record. It is my first read in the morning, and what I do here at VentureBeat is linked with the Merc’s mission. Like most of the people at the Merc, I care about the community in a broader sense. That is why I’m covering things from a geographical standpoint, as opposed to an industry niche.”

Read more here.