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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.
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.