Did Craigslist decimate newspapers?
"Here in six short chapters is the tale of Craigslist’s rise to a business generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year, how Newmark has used that fortune and how newspapers, slow to adapt, failed to respond effectively to the digital shift.”
For years, Craig Newmark has been one of the fall guys for the decline of the newspaper business. Instead, the blame should absolutely lie with the news leaders who failed to adapt to changing platforms.
This is commonly described as failing to adapt to digital, but I’ve always thought it was more than that: digital just allowed there to be more platforms, which in turn allowed more people to create offerings that were closer to what people actually wanted. It’s not that newspapers were ever the best product possible to meet peoples’ needs: it’s that newspapers were the closest product that was actually available in the market. The advent of the web changed that dynamic.
This piece in Poynter lays out the history, and points out some blunt home truths:
“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 fatal weakness of the news industry — certainly then, but arguably in many newsrooms now — is that many of the people involved think they are the best arbiters for what people want and need, rather than finding ways to test those assumptions, build more representative newsrooms, and ensure that their assumptions are actually right.
Craigslist was a better product than newspaper classifieds, and newspaper leaders were both constitutionally and structurally unable to adapt to a changing world. They assumed the world would stay more or less the same, which is always a mistake.
Craig himself is a gem. He’s spent large sums of his own money in order to protect journalism, boost cybersecurity, support military families, and other initiatives that are unquestionably doing good. It’s good to see that laid out in a piece like this.
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