San Jose is the third-largest city in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States.

While best known as the newspaper of Silicon Valley, the San Jose Mercury News enjoys the ranking of one of the top ten newspapers in the country by the Columbia Journalism Review and was named the boldest American newspaper by the Society for Newspaper Design.

Founded in 1851 as the San Jose Weekly Visitor, the San Jose Mercury News has grown into one of the nation's great dailies. Drawing its name from the region's quicksilver mines, the San Jose Mercury News covered the evolution of an agricultural community into a global technology center.

San Jose is the county seat of Santa Clara County. For the past several years, it has held the title of The Safest Big City in America.

San Jose is located in Silicon Valley, at the south end of the San Francisco Bay. With a population of 953,679, San Jose is the largest city in Northern California. Once was a small farming city by 1950, San Jose was first a magnet for suburban newcomers in new housing developments (1960s to the 1990s) and became a large thriving urban center of Northern California, sometimes nicknamed L.A. North points out a similarity to Los Angeles by the end of the 20th century.