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Newmark Denies Craigslist Is Killing Newspapers
Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld has an interview with Craig Newmark about the history of Craigslist and it's growth over the years (it's now expanding into foreign-language markets — it recently created several Spanish sites in Spanish cities). He also disputes the notion that Craigslist is responsible for dismantling newspapers' revenue models. Rather, he blames niche-classified sites like autotrader.com and Monster as well as newspapers' unrealistic profit expectations in the new media world: 'Newspapers are going after 10% to 30% profit margins for their businesses and that hurts them more than anything. A lot of things are happening on the Internet that never happened before because the Internet is a vehicle for everyone. The mass media is no longer only for the powerful, and that's a huge change for the entire newspaper and news industry."
On the one hand, the newspaper's days are numbered. Who wants to go outside and dig their paper out of the snow to read yesterday's news when they can go online and get what's happening right now?
On the other hand, that's a damn shame. All the news media in recent times has become, frankly, a laughing stock, but newspapers it seems have held onto the most integrity (not that that's saying much). More importantly, we need someone who can pay reporters to investigate the government, and bloggers just aren't going to cut it.
I fear living in a world where the only things a government has to worry about are citizen journalists and internal leaks.
It's funny to see someone bothering to repute claims that Craigslist "kills" newspapers. The question is not whether it does or doesn't (and IMO it does in a way), but why should we care?
It's a free market out there. Craigslist is able to offer services better than newspapers. Newspapers should either adapt to compete, or they deserve to die. Why should there be some kind of welfare state for newspapers where they have to be supported externally, or even more important, why should better technologies be attacked for outcompeting worse ones?
Do you attack cars for "killing" horse-and-carriage? Do you attack e-mail for reducing profits of snail mail/fax sales (and it did by a very large margin)? If the technology is able to better provide the service, it is the one that deserves to get the market.
I understand that many people base the argument like that "Newspapers offer content we like, but can only be funded by ads. Now people use craigslist for ads instead of papers, so papers have no money to publish other content with". While this may seem more indirect, I don't see why this is any more valid than the earlier example. If people are not willing to pay for the content on its own (via newspaper sales), then maybe you should move out of the market, or actually make your content worthwhile.
The "broadsheet" papers which actually offer content you don't see on a typical news site for free (such as in-depth editorials) are the ones that are still selling. If all your paper had is a bulletpoint list of recent events and a local buy-sell section, then why does it deserve to live in the first place, when you can get both free online (the first from any news site, the second from Craigslist). And if you claim your paper supposedly brings some value to the "good old mom-and-pop local community", then get the community to pay for it, either through a local tax the community agrees on, or through increased paper prices. If the community is not willing to pay either, than guess what, the value your paper provides to the community just isn't good enough for them to pay for.
Either offer something that's good on its own (and better than the competition), or get the hell out of the business. The protectionist neoluddism of "papers being oppressed by the evil Craigslist" is seriously pissing me off.
but still people can't tell the possessive ITS from the contraction IT'S==IT IS.
Newspapers still have a virtual monopoly on one aspect of newsmaking: digging deep, traveling, researching, and fact-checking. Unfortunately, MOST newspapers are just regurgitators of whatever the AP or other news-wires spend big bucks to write. The days of the old traveling reporter seem to be short, but there are still a few out there who really work hard to get the news.
The Internet, on the other hand, is still a beacon of opinion, without much digging. Facts aren't checked (not that all mainstream press outlet do much of that), biases are obvious, and many bloggers just preach to the choir. That's an area that isn't likely to change.
The big item of interest, though, is always financial: "Can I do this, and can I make money at it?" I think the obvious answer for almost all forms of media is: YES, and more of a yes than any time in the past. For two generations, musicians tended to only make money when they were corporately owned. Now, individual groups can make money just by promoting themselves and their tours online. The same is true with journalism, or even movie making. Heck, the Ron Paul girl has made five figures just taking her clothes off and promoting the candidate. Amazing. Soon, we'll see theatre and acting groups rendering their own sitcoms on YouTube for a small profit, but they still won't have the backend that the mainstream companies do: script-writers, fact-checkers, editors, sound people, crew, etc.
I like the new age, because it does open up options for the individual to earn a living. I know quite a few people who now make almost 6-figures annual blogging (but they're working 50-60 hours a week on their sites!). I know more than one band who is making more than 6-figures annual with no record label contract. I know a graphic designer or two who are making a decent living by drawing cartoon characters for individual companies, churches and organizations and not having to "slave" 40 hours a week for Disney or another employer.
I do think the classifieds HAVE to go away, but I don't think Craigslist is necessarily the answer or the final option. The web will likely move to a more object-oriented fashion, rather than purely single HTML endlinks. I've always theorized that particular web pages will be broken down to segments of information, designated with content variables ("tags"), that will be easily integrated into the desktop sites of others. I know Microsoft tried this eons ago, and it failed, but the web wasn't ready.
Why should I post an ad to craiglist for a 2001 Toro lawnmower for sale in zip code 60031, when I can just pop in an object into my MySpace, or my blog, or another site, signifying an object for-sale, the price, the zip code, etc, and allow Google or other search engines to point interested buyers to that particular object? Maybe we'll have sites that integrate all those similar objects into a mash-up of information to utilize for other people's needs (like we're now seeing with websites that mash-up data from various non-similar sites of data).
The answer in the long-run is not another market or company that takes over information disperal, but the individualization of data in an object form for many individuals or organizations to provide for new markets to develop. A personal blog may be composed of 20 individual objects, all with their own tags, all distributable in their own singular nature to be re-displayed on various sites for whatever purpose.
Methinks HTML is dying, fast. Even the Web 2.0 stuff seems to be ready for extinction. A new day, a new web, will really harm the Web 2.0 companies that are still focusing on the page, instead of breaking down the individual content within the page.
So what if the Craigslist IS killing the newspaper industry? I don't see anyone getting up in arms about the automobile killing the horse drawn carriage industry.
Times change. Business models face extinction just as species do.
Question everything
All the paper consisted of was were wire reports. Usually the exact same content I had read via Yahoo or Cnn.com the day before. There was very little local investigative journalism. They did a 5-part expose on the local fire districts and some stuff that was going on there with the wives of firefighters being elected to boards/etc. Back in 2005. But not much since.
I forget the lady's name (The old woman in front row of the White House daily briefings (Helen something). She wrote a book about this topic a few years ago and she pointed out that it was this lack of in depth local news reporting was the major reason why newspapers were loosing so much readership. Her reason is that hiring investigative reports and having a real news room is expensive. So in order to boost short term profits....
This boils down to one thing: Content. You have good content, people will come. It doesn't matter if that is on the web or in print.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
All you're saying (and I agree with you) is that Craigslist found something that worked, and has been conservative in making gratuitous changes. Now that's smart, because it serves to keep giving people what they want, rather than forcing them to continually adapt to a changing product. When you do that, you give them a reason to find an alternative that they might like more.
... and some people don't.
Some people like the fact that every time they go to their favorite site it's something new and different
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
for their own downfall.
/. readers know that story so I won't regurgitate it.
/. knows this. The interesting thing will be to observe what happens when Craigslist and its cohorts sell out to the same corporate interests for the big score and start degrading the content. Will new challengers spring up online to steal their lunch in the same manner?
Radio has been killed by ClearChannel's near total monopoly of the airwaves. Yes, they no longer have competition in radio, but they've ended the diversity held the audience's attention, and pushed commercials up to the point where you have to wade through 10 minutes of used-car ads to get to the 4 minutes of bland commercial pop.
Newspapers, meanwhile, stopped doing real journalism 15 years ago. It's much easier to pay a fee for AP articles and an editor to arrange them on a page around ad space than to keep on a staff of journalists doing in-depth investigative pieces; heck, it's even cheaper to change a couple words in the press releases companies send to newspapers these days and print them verbatim than to license AP articles--that's what more and more "news" outlets are doing these days.
TV, well, reality programs are boring, and commercials are annoying, and the few programs worth watching are in endless re-runs thanks to the writer's strike; or, the movies they run on cable are just promotional vehicles for the sequels that are coincidentally debuting next Friday.
Movies and music.
In short, greed, corporatism (is that redundant with greed?), and focus group-tested pap that the old media have pumped out in the last decade to maximize profits has alienated the audience. Craigslist and other segments of the Internet are simply doing a better job of taking over the few useful activities the old used to perform, but without all the baggage.
Everyone on
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
There are a lot of people pretty chuffed with their horse-and-carriage-beaten-by-car analogy; nobody seems to notice that the replacement isn't better, it's *worse*. As a newspaper, Craiglist sucks. But it has taken over one of the key ways newspapers make money.
It's not a straightforward "outdated business model" this: the model's been outdated since the radio came along. Nobody needs to buy news: we're drowning in free news. But we do need to live in a society where politicians and the powerful are held to account, where corruption is exposed and so on. The best way we've seen so far for doing this is investigative journalism, which isn't cheap. In fact, journalism is incredibly expensive to create. There isn't a single newspaper website out there that can afford to pay for the cost of its journalism by itself; they rely on subsidy from their print operations.
A Free Press isn't free. It has just been our luck that newspapers could make enough money from small ads to pay for all the journalists without actually having to try and sell us the unsellable (news). That luck is running out.
Traditional mass media is obsolete. Were the internet a simple issue of distribution, then, newspapers would simply be the same thing, but cheaper. What's happened is that people are interested in their own niches of information, and mass media simply can't get its head around it. All of the sifting through events that reporters and editors used to do, the internet makes pointless. Because there is essentially infinite bandwidth, you don't need someone to decide what news is worth actually distributing. Now, it all can be distributed.
You can get in depth knowledge on any topic. The odd review about a car or a movie in the paper just can't cut it compared to the in depth information you get from a direct source. Why go to the Philadelphia Inquirer car section or computer section when I can go to not just one, but any number of computer or car web sites. About all that newspapers are good for are sports columnists, and even they have made a transition to online or, gasp, radio talk shows. On the other end of the scale, a lot of information reporters get comes from 3rd hand sources, such as the AP Wires, and now, you can get the same article online.
You can get any information you want. If you want to find out what is going on in Switzerland, you can go to a web site in Switzerland and read it. If you want to find out what's going on in politics, you don't have to be aggravated that your political view isn't represented in the media. On the internet, all views are.
You can find anyone to agree with you. Newspapers and broadcast media needed to foster the notion that there was a mainstream of opinion, a sweet spot or common ground for everyone. Reality is a lot more complex and we're finding that there's no such thing as mainstream. There's a lot of people online, and, on any given topic, you can find someone that agrees with you. You don't have to believe you are an outcast, when you have 30,000 people that form their own online community. If someone else calls me a crackpot for wanting to pave the earth, I can find someone to agree with me.
This trend isn't going to affect just newspapers and broadcast media. They are just the first pickings. In the future, every traditional role of knowledge acquisition and distribution will be upended by the democratizing influence of the internet. At some point, as search tools get better, and communications improves, there won't even be a need for a specialized formal education. We are moving towards, truly, the world of the matrix, where if we want to learn to fly a helicopter, we'll find it on google.
This is my sig.
The articles is absolutely correct when it states newspapers are killing themselves, which is why I left 4 years ago. Publishers know that the profit margins of old are long gone, however their response to that is what is causing it's greatest harm - an insatiable appetite to reduce expenses...rather than an expansion into other services to grow revenue. Newspaper publishers and owners are the most pessimistic people on the planet. Their favorite, and most often decision-making process is the "decision to make no decision" - thus, their unwillingness to change with the times will leave them buried in the past.