Did Craigslist Really Kill the Newspaper Industry? (poynter.org)
- Reference: 0178550860
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/08/03/0611232/did-craigslist-really-kill-the-newspaper-industry
- Source link: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/did-craigslist-kill-newspapers-poynter-50/
> "I've always wondered about that," Newmark said in a Zoom interview July 1. "I think it had an effect." But portraying him and the list as torpedoing an otherwise great business model is way overblown, he still believes. Citing [2]an influential essay by Thomas Baekdal , Newmark contends that the root of newspapers' trouble was the loss of readers. "TV hit hard. ... (And) l'm like the folks on 'CSI,' I follow the evidence. That goes back at least to the '60s."
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> Bad in itself, the loss also took away newspapers' dominant share of local audiences and ability to charge premium classified ad rates. The slide in circulation looks even worse, Baekdal pointed out, when compared to continued increases in the number of households over the years.
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> Still, Craigslist came to symbolize the shift. Dozens of other vertical digital sites cropped up, before and after, all offering a deadly competitive pairing of an effective and much cheaper service than newspaper classifieds. Even if Craigslist was just one of many, though, it was arguably Newmark who put a face on the massive disruption... By the early 2000s, newspaper executives had a dawning awareness of the business challenge from Craigslist and similar sites. They took minimal action to meet it...
>
> The biggest response was that three big companies — Knight-Ridder, Tribune and Gannett — bought a copycat of Monster called CareerBuilder... By the time newspapers acted, online classifieds had a full head of steam... By 2010, 70% of the newspaper industry's print classified business was gone. Reliable statistics are no longer kept, but the trend continued over the last 15 years... Newspapers continue to do well only with paid obituaries and legal notices, though the latter is now also under threat by digital startups.
The article cites a 2019 analysis from Peter Zollman, whose AIM Group consultancy has followed the classified business for 25 years. "Craigslist has often been blamed for killing newspapers, but that's a gross canard. It just isn't true."
> American newspapers stumbled while several well-managed counterparts in places like Scandinavia found ways to prosper, he argued.
[1] https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2025/did-craigslist-kill-newspapers-poynter-50/
[2] https://baekdal.com/monetization/the-updated-and-scary-circulation-and-revenue-figures-for-newspapers/
Weird thing about Craigslist (Score:1)
I have seen this repeatedly in different categories. You have a space for thousands of characters to provide detailed information about whatever it is you're posting. Someone writes a single sentence of about 100 characters with misspellings.
If you can't be bothered to give information, why should I be bothered to contact you?
Re: (Score:2)
> I have seen this repeatedly in different categories. You have a space for thousands of characters to provide detailed information about whatever it is you're posting. Someone writes a single sentence of about 100 characters with misspellings.
A large percentage of the population is stupid and not capable of writing or even thinking coherently. This is not new.
Re: (Score:2)
And what makes it really weird is that every post was composed in a browser and all browsers, even in phones, have a spelling checker to avoid exactly that. Now, I understand that if you're using your phone to place the ad, backing up to correct a typo isn't easy; about the only practical way is to delete text until you reach the typo then re-enter the text and hope that you get it right this time, but that's a different rant. If you must use your phone that way, keep an eye on the text you're entering, a
User tracking killed the newspaper (Score:2, Interesting)
It's killing network TV too. There's no money left because user tracking gives online advertising a competitive advantage over other forms of advertising.
Ban the use of user tracking and you'd have a level playing field again.
Re: (Score:2)
It's common wisdom that the data gathered through user tracking is valuable, but I'm not convinced it's true. Most of the numbers compare prices from the same ad network, for example they compare what you get for tracked Facebook ads vs untracked Facebook ads. But Facebook has an incentive to push tracking because that's how they differentiate themselves from other ad networks, so it makes sense they would underpay for untracked ads. The reason I believe that is because there's a massive market that is now
Not necessarily (Score:2)
If users are anonymous and using VPNs the data is worthless. Meanwhile advertisiers roughly the kind of person living in a certain TV (or radio) broadcast area who watches/listens to a certain type of program.
Re: (Score:2)
Print papers and their ads, implemented user tracking too. If you clipped a coupon, the coupon would generally have a code on it that, when redeemed, tied the purchase to the source of the coupon (newspaper, mailer, whatever). Stores also tracked individual purchases through credit card or checking account numbers, enabling them to tie specific customers to specific ads.
Online ads just amplified and sped up the tracking, they didn't invent it.
Phones (Score:2)
People are bombarded with news all the time on their phones. Society has changed from being starved of news to information overload, there isn't room for newspapers these days.
BBS's where there long before Craig left The Well (Score:3)
I had a "for sale" subboard on my Commodore 64 Color 64 BBS in 1985. Later, there were dozens upon dozens of forsale boards on Usenet as well.
Re: (Score:2)
> I had a "for sale" subboard on my Commodore 64 Color 64 BBS in 1985. Later, there were dozens upon dozens of forsale boards on Usenet as well.
I wonder if that dinette set in New Jersey is still available.
Re: (Score:2)
> I had a "for sale" subboard on my Commodore 64 Color 64 BBS in 1985. Later, there were dozens upon dozens of forsale boards on Usenet as well.
Sure. But these foresale boards had quite limited distribution. If you really wanted to buy or sell locally you needed to go where the masses were. That was not BBS's or Usenet. Craigslist appealed to the masses and came at a time when the masses had access.
No. (Score:3)
Betteridge strikes again!
Now if Craigslist had a print version (Score:2)
Have a seat son, we have some digital news to tell ya. Would you like some coffee?
reality (Score:2, Interesting)
The Internet killed newspapers, blame Drudge et al, not Craig's list And then no one read the ads anymore, doh Craig's list just came along at the right time - it was free and newspaper ads cost money
Re:reality (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry to disappoint. The internet is only part of the equation. What is killing (not killed, yet) the newspaper industry is a combination of rising costs (Paper, Ink, Replacement parts, Delivery fees, staff wages) and loss of ad revenue (which is were the internet comes in).
I work for a small-town newspaper. We cover 3 1/2 Counties. Circulation is over 50k for a daily paper. We have been there since the late 1880's. We continue to put our news. In the early 1900's we averaged about 40 pages a day. Now we are down to 16 (always based on 4 pages). Back in the early 1900's we averaged about $0.5052 (in 2025 money) per page gross profit. Now, about $0.0032 per page. Yes, we track it down to that level and have since 1905.
The are multiple reasons:
- First is the cost of paper. In the 1900's paper was cheap, and I do mean cheap. A roll of paper was maybe $100 (again in 2025 dollars) and now they are upwards of over $500 per roll (thanks Trump, we can't buy US paper, it isn't made. We tried.) We need 2 rolls per day.
- Second is the cost of the aluminum plates we need, daily, to print the paper. We buy them by the Ton (think about a 1/2 height pallet worth) every 3 months. That's over $5000 for something we use once then thrown away. (local recycling company likes us and helps cut our overall cost of those plates down)
- Third is the cost of ink. We buy in bulk 3 times a year. The heavily concentrated ink run us about $20K per year. In the early 1900's that same ink for the larger run was around $500 per year in 2025 dollars. We did use less color back then.
- Fourth is the cost of staff. We have less than 50 employees now but the average wage is at about $18/hr. In the late 1900's the average wage was $12/hr and the early 1900's it was closer to $5/hour, again adjusted to 2025 dollars. 5 years ago we had 3 people in "Customer Service" our front line at the office. They took calls, handles Circulation, Classifieds, and routed things to reporters and Advertising staff. Now we have 1, which happens to be vacant at the moment. We put out notices we are hiring. 5 years ago we had over 100 applicants for the positions, so far after a month, we have had 3. Two of them wanted way more money than we can afford to pay, and the 3rd.. while they may get hired they are not going to last. Stereotypical Millennium attitude just isn't a good fit for Customer Service.
- Fifth is cost of hardware to even make the paper. Our press was put in place in 1968. It still runs. It still puts out very good quality papers, but it is 50+ years old. Parts are hard to find. We were lucky and were able to buy a duplicate press in 2000 from a newspaper that was going out of business. We have plenty of spare parts, at the moment. A replacement press? That is upwards of $20 million and at least a year before it can be installed. We use Intel Macs for most of our systems and will be using them until they fail. We can't afford to replace desktop machines whenever the OS and hardware manufacturers say we have to. We even have a test program to see if we can migrate most of our hardware to Linux and keep using the hardware even longer. $200-500 per machine (used/refurbished) is too much if we have to replace them every 3 years. We still have a couple of old WindowsXP machines, and several Mac OS9 machines around for specialized hardware controls. Replacing those? Won't happen as the hardware they control would also have to be replaced at costs upwards of $500,000 each. Next is the software need (not want, NEED) runs us over $500/month. We don't get a choice, there isn't a viable alternative to them, We have had to get creative in how we use the software by sharing a single machine, remotely, so that 4-5 people use a single copy of the software. Per the ToS and EULAs we are using the software legally. (IP is important to us) Just means time-sharing a single machine. Oh yes, and it can't be upgraded any further since at least one of the programs no longer is being supporte
[1]Read the rest of this comment...
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23759370&cid=65563790
Re: (Score:2)
I forgot to add, we have a (hard) copy of each and every paper we have ever published. Can these new all electronic news sites and advertising sites say that?
We know who advertised with us in 1905, and how much they paid for that ad, what they advertised and for how much because we still have the hard-copy. We know who advertised with us last month. We have the hard copy and the digital copy.
Local store wants to have a Nostalgia day? No problem we can pull up the old ads and help them build it. Can thes
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for the interesting insight. I do think your style of local paper are very, very important to keep alive in the sense of them being a public good so your ability to profit shouldn't be the sole factor.
I've long had the idea of doing a sort of "blind trust" federal funding program for local papers like yours so make sure you are able to stay in circulation. I would even use that same funding source to establish local papers where there were non before, I think every township needs journalists wh
Re: (Score:2)
It really comes down to just the ad revenue. There would be a ton more of it in your hands if the advertisers weren't off running after the individually tracked user data provided by online ad networks.
There wouldn't be a costs problem once the ad revenue is sorted. And sorting that requires levelling of the playing field. The solution for that is regulation to ban user tracking. It's been obvious for 20+ years.
Re: (Score:2)
Rising costs affect all businesses not just newspapers. Take out rising costs and we're left with what I said.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't believe paper, ink etc have become more expensive. Everything except real estate continuously becomes cheaper over time. The only way stuff gets more expensive is if the quality increases (c.f. cars - their quality is waaay better today than during the 80s).
Nothing killed the newspaper industry (Score:1)
It was always a temporary solution and its run is done. With a global data network, physical delivery of news on paper is a historic thing.
Re: (Score:2)
Thats what people said about books when e-readers came out. Guess what....
Some of us actually prefer reading stuff on dead trees rather than eye straining screens (e-ink or not).
Re: (Score:2)
It looks like in the USA, ebook and audiobook usage is still increasing:
[1]https://pufferprint.com/wp-con... [pufferprint.com]
I also checked the statistics from my country and it looks like money is going from physical books to e books so fast that in 20 years there will no longer be printed books to sell (obviously the speed will slow down at some point). So I could say that this is still in progress and physical books will eventually die out, because the less physical books are sold, the less they will be printed and the less
[1] https://pufferprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/ft_2022.01.06_bookreaders_01.webp
Re: (Score:2)
> Some of us actually prefer reading stuff on dead trees rather than eye straining screens (e-ink or not).
Yes, some (=few) do that. And hence it is a specialty item. For books, there are now "print on demand" machines that can make single copies cheap enough. But mass-production of books is over or rather will be over when the printing-presses for that reach the end of their lifetime.
Re: (Score:2)
Spotted owls killed the newspaper industry.
Nope (Score:2, Insightful)
Newspapers killed themselves. The Craigslist guy approached them. They told him to piss off. They killed themselves.
Billionaires killed it (Score:4, Insightful)
Billionaires buying it up and turn them into propaganda rags for the right wing pro corporate policies did it.
There is absolutely no useful information in a newspaper anymore. Since 2016 they have absolutely killed what little was left of journalism. You get a small amount of factual information from the associate press and other than that any actual useful reporting has to come from overseas or occasionally from independent journalism.
And every time one of those independent journalists breaks out and starts to build a platform the billionaires come in and do one of two things. If they can they buy it and turn it more propaganda slop.
And if they can't buy it they do what they did to Gawker where they sue it into oblivion. Most journalism has to pay the bills with a bit of muckraking and celebrity gossip and it's easy to use that to shut everything down.
There was actually a ton of independent journalism going on over on twitter... Until Elon bought it and turned it into more right-wing propaganda slop.
I am not going to pay somebody money to have them sell me down the river for a handful of billionaires and mega corporations and no matter how stupid Americans are they aren't going to go for that either.
Re: (Score:2)
Both right wing and left wing media are biased. Even if they are not telling lies, they are at least deciding which stories to tell. And this is not something new, it has been going on for decades. Generally news are more likely to tell bad news than good news, because people are more willing to read bad news. Good example is gun violence in the USA. If violence is decreasing, there are no news about it, but if it is increasing, there are news about it. If you look at the actual statistics, you will see tha
newspaper downfall (Score:2)
When newspapers when from news to a couple of soft articles and page after page of ads, That killed news papers.
Yes, but not just Craigslist (Score:3, Insightful)
Craigslist was part of the problem, but not all of it.
Newspapers traditionally had a 3 legged stool of revenue:
- subscriptions
- display ads (on paper)
- classifieds
Google and Facebook ate the display ads, Craigslist ate the classifieds, leaving them with mostly just subscriptions. Add in that most US newspapers were bought by private equity that loaded them up with debt payments, and most newspapers had higher costs (interest on their debt) at the same time they had 70% less revenue. To respond to that gap, they laid off reporters and writers, making the product worse ... chasing away their subscription revenue as well.
Poynter Institute (Score:1, Troll)
If Poytner Institute wasn't such a politicized organization, always bent on blaming others, they would see that newspapers killed themselves.
Craigslist certainly took away the revenue papers had in classified ads. But that was not their major source of revenue. Corporate display ads were always the biggest source of revenue for newspapers.
Newspaper revenues reached the financial break even point with expensive print advertising. From business card sized ads to quarter page, full page, magazines... it was co
The internet killed newspapers, magazines, and TV (Score:1)
It's just a better medium. It's cheaper and faster.
Newer, better technologies take over older technologies. Cell phones took over landlines. Cars took over horses and buggies.
Re: (Score:2)
Mobile phones are NOT better than wired phones unless you really need mobility
Re: (Score:2)
> Mobile phones are NOT better than wired phones unless you really need mobility
Which most people DO
Re: (Score:1)
Yes, and physical newspapers are better at swatting flies and lining bird cages. But why be pedantic?
newspapers are still relevant (Score:3)
You can't start a charcoal grill with craigslist.
Re: newspapers are still relevant (Score:1)
we still get paper junk mail where I live.
35 years ago I had to pay $20 to list (Score:2)
an item in the newspaper classified that I was selling for $60. When the Internet came a long it was free to list.
Internet classifieds were WAY better than print (Score:2)
Craigslist and other internet classifieds offered several advantages over print:
- They were free, while print classifieds were expensive.
- They were searchable, no need to scan through tons of irrelevant listings or multiple newspaper editions.
- They were instantaneous. Within seconds of submitting your post, readers could start finding it.
- They were available to everyone, not just to the portion of the population that paid for newspaper subscriptions.
Worse, newspapers were VERY slow to stand up their own
No (Score:2)
What killed newspapers as news sources was the 24 hour news cycle. That was created by cable TV initially. But that misses the reality that newspapers were never only about news.
They had multiple sections that appealed to a wide variety of specific audiences and, more importantly, advertisers customers. They had comics, sports, crossword puzzles, food sections, auto sections, entertainment and society pages. When TV appeared, they had the local TV program schedule. They provided a section for anything that
Two questions (Score:4, Insightful)
> "Did Craigslist Really Kill the Newspaper Industry?"..."Did Craigslist drive the downfall of print classifieds?"
Those are actually two very different questions, and should not be grouped together (unless it can be shown that one caused the other).
Re:Two questions (Score:4, Insightful)
Leaving aside the question of how we got here... The reason I have almost zero interest in newspapers is their lack of quality content. It used to be there were things like investigative journalism and muckraking, you know, all the society's watchdog stuff.
That is all history now, and any attempts at such are immediately shot down as $enemy-of-the-day propaganda, not only by fellow "journalists", but by the public at large, too. What remains in our contemporary newspapers is manufacturing of consent, fellating of public officials, marketing of party agenda, hopium, copium, and thinly guised propaganda. Why on earth would I spend my time and money on that steaming pile?
"Democracy dies in darkness," says the Washington Post, and if you read them, you realize they and every other media org have chosen the side of darkness. Fuck em with a pineapple, I hope they die.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
10 years ago I was buying/selling things on Craigslist pretty frequently. Now, using Craigslist feels like watching a 1963 black and white television.
I'm surprised Craigslist still exists. It is pretty much a ghost town, at least in my area. It has been completely replaced by the big social media platforms.
1980 and the rise of "soft news" (Score:4, Insightful)
Other ways the newspapers went downhill:
- The rise of soft news
- Every article having a filler material vignette at the start and, most of the time, at the end
- Excessive appeals to emotion
- Increasing ratio of photographs to facts, dates, numbers and quotes in news articles
- News topic areas, such as health news, focusing nearly all on one demographic group
- Loss of reporters with deep knowledge and experience with the generation that fought in WWII retiring
Soft news:
- human interest stories and feel good stories (brights)
- arts and entertainment
- sports
- celebrity gossip
- society pages
- did you know, how to
Vignettes - [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
- A vignette is a French loanword expressing a short and descriptive piece of writing that captures a brief period in time.Vignettes are more focused on vivid imagery and meaning rather than plot.
[2]https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/ed... [sagepub.com].
"Hard news is the embodiment of the “watchdog” or observational role of journalism. Typically, hard news includes coverage of political, economic, or military significance, or social issues with political, economic, or military implications (such as crime coverage and stories about political demonstrations). Hard news stories also carry temporal imperatives—hard news indicates events that are current and time sensitive."
"Soft news, then, is everything else. The term soft news can be (and has been) applied to human interest stories, arts and entertainment, sports, celebrity gossip, society pages, and similar topics."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignette_(literature)
[2] https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/the-sage-encyclopedia-of-journalism-2e/chpt/hard-versus-soft-news
Re:1980 and the rise of "soft news" (Score:4, Insightful)
You're pretty spot on but I think you are missing the largest and most important Soft news category: political opinion which is probably 90% of the alternative news space today.
Like we can rip on the NYT, Wapo, The Atlantic, WSJ and many times should but as mentioned before is these large operations are still the ones paying actual journalists to go out and do actual investigative reporting or even just standard day to day event reporting.
What has cropped up around it is countless news sites that really just summarize and opinionate on the reporting those orgs do and pass it off really as their own. Sure there might be a link in there but it's an easy way to take a news story, add your political bias to it and then get your narrative in front of the reader with the knowledge most wont go to read the actual story so a few exaggerations and misconstructions is nothing to worry about.
Like how many people have the weeks news about Epstein from the WSJ, the publication that has done the most actual journalism on it the past few weeks? Most probably read it on an alternative site using the WSJ story.
Same for the whole Epstein thing at all, it was pretty successfully swept under the rug since the 2008 under the table plea deal until [1]Julie K Brown [wikipedia.org], a journalist with *local newspaper The Miami Herald* found victims and did writeups in 2018.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_K._Brown
One of the main issues - "Softening Words" (Score:3, Interesting)
Take just about any news article and you will find lots of softening words and phrases.
They deflect from the real story, let reports humanize, for sympathy, favored demographic groups and bias the news.
A good example of how this works - [1]https://www.irishtimes.com/bus... [irishtimes.com]
[2]https://www.worthwhileconsulti... [worthwhileconsulting.com]
The Dangers of Softening Language
- De-bias - In 2020, I was hired to advise a national news organization on how to debias their language. One point I made repeatedly was to avoid what I call “softening
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/07/14/truthiness-and-why-people-love-a-good-story/
[2] https://www.worthwhileconsulting.com/read-watch-listen/the-dangers-of-softening-language
Agree (Score:2)
Agree that news is now filled with filler material
- the political opinion pieces
- repeatedly producing opinion polls and presenting them as fact instead of doing the footwork to investigate, find sources, verify facts and report news
- regurgitation of earlier news stories, parroting of other news sources
- rewriting the same article day after day with no new information - Day X of Jane Smith's criminal trial today, lots of contention in the court room, ...
- using social media instagram / tictok rants as news
Re: (Score:3)
- Omitting inconvenient facts
- failure to seek out opposing views
And almost always, the inconvenient facts are those that support an opposing POV because the so-called journalist writing the article believes that it's his job to push his personal political/social/economic slant rather than the truth, and his "editors" want a site filled with thinly-disguised editorials instead of facts.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think there was ever a time when most of these weren't true. You might as well add the sunday comics, if you're going to complain about non-news in newspapers.
There was no "rise of soft news." It was always there.
Newspapers breaking news is obsolete. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes but that has all transferred to digital mediums. What killed the newspaper is cost and that the news was older than the public was accustomed to with internet/phone/tv etc. Someone has to deliver the paper, which as time goes on becomes more costly (more than inflation?). But biggest of all is that people want up to date news, not something that happened yesterday. At least for the big news pieces, which is what newspapers were trying to cover. Science or other news that is not so urgent, pieces that would go into a magazine, there's not the expectation of knowing right then and now.
It's the money [Re:Newspapers breaking news is...] (Score:5, Insightful)
More, I think, it's that you can find news for free on the web.
Yes, there are some news sites you have to pay for-- New York Times, Washington Post. But just take a look even at slashdot comments when an article links to a paid site-- you instantly get half a dozen posts complaining about the "paywall" (and then one or two suggesting how to avoid the paywall.)
Re:Two questions (Score:5, Insightful)
> Leaving aside the question of how we got here... The reason I have almost zero interest in newspapers is their lack of quality content. It used to be there were things like investigative journalism and muckraking, you know, all the society's watchdog stuff.
This requires paid journalists. Paying journalists requires making money. If newspapers don't have a means to make money, no, you're not getting in-depth investigative journalism.
So, your comment is just the flip side of the same question.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You're missing a key ingredient there which is the desire to actually do investigative journalism in the first place. That's not the mission anymore. Personally, I think that's due to short attention spans which are captured by "soft news" largely delivered and consumed on socials, and the media being a tool of political agendas.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not so much media being a tool of political agendas but capital ones. The short attention spans, soft news, social media, that's just where people are and if media, including journalism, is going to have to exist in a capital market to survive then they are going to respond to market incentives.
If we think real investigative journalism and public affairs reporting and record keeping and all that is an important enough function that it should always exist then we have to make that decision and then a
Re: (Score:2)
> That's not so much media being a tool of political agendas but capital ones.
The one thing is the other, because many if not most laws are now written by corporate lawyers and then handed to congresspeople for introduction and sponsorship. You cannot separate capital and politics under capitalism.
Re: Two questions (Score:2)
It happens all the time. But under the system you claim to want, socialism, politicians take capital by force and then have a monopoly on it. Under economic fascism (which seems to be your preferred system, even though you don't seem to be aware of that) the politicians take direct control over it whenever they want while you assume all liabilities.
Getting sucked into one publication's bubble (Score:2)
Part of the problem is that there's no way to pay "journalists" as a whole. Because of electronic payment networks' fees per transaction, online newspapers have to sell a monthly subscription, not a single issue they way they would with cash in a vending machine. And a subscription to NYT includes zero articles from WaPo or WSJ. This means readers get sucked into the ideological bubble of the one publication that happens to be part of their subscription plan.
Re: (Score:2)
> This requires paid journalists. Paying journalists requires making money. If newspapers don't have a means to make money, no, you're not getting in-depth investigative journalism.
Papers make money with ads. You can't sell ad space if you don't have readers. You don't have readers if you don't have worthwhile articles.
So yes, paying journalists requires making money, but making money also requires paying journalists. They seem to have forgotten that part.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd argue that Facebook Marketplace is now killing off Craigslist. It's just easier to use for less technically savvy people.
Re: (Score:2)
>> "Did Craigslist Really Kill the Newspaper Industry?"..."Did Craigslist drive the downfall of print classifieds?"
> Those are actually two very different questions, and should not be grouped together (unless it can be shown that one caused the other).
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
--The Sun Also Rises
On the one hand, newspaper circulation growth was not keeping up with population growth. Personally, I blame the decline in public education since the 1970's. On the other hand, Craigslist definitely drove the downfall of print classifieds. And print classifieds were *the* money maker for newspapers. The ads and ad inserts were a smaller part of the income.
So if you take away the major source of
Re: (Score:1)
News is a business, and it's not the business of selling news. It's the business of selling advertising. When advertising revenue tanks, the industry tanks. Even a cursory examination of how the industry works - and has worked for over a century - will show that, in fact, one did cause the other.
Re: (Score:2)
Print Classifieds were one of the larger revenue sources for newspapers. Craigslist and eBay pretty much gutted that revenue source. Without the revenue, the industry has withered away.