It's odd. People didn't buy newspapers for the classifieds. Classifieds were there nonetheless and they appear to have kept the lights on for the newspaper.
It suggests the newspaper funding model was already broken — they just didn't know it until the internet came along.
Of course by my own fucked up logic then any enterprise making money based on advertisements is on a precarious footing since no one engages in their business for the ads.
Sure, but then that meant you probably bought the odd single issue, or maybe for an extended period until you found a job. You didn't buy a subscription for the sole purpose of looking at the classifieds.
I expect many people reading this are too young to remember. But, other than a Sunday paper from time to time, it wasn't that uncommon for me to buy a newspaper for the local classifieds or help wanted ads from time to time. And, other than sometimes watching the nightly news or having a weekly subscription to Time, the (typically) Sunday paper was more or less my only source for news in a given week.
Which is exactly the existential cliff that the ad driven economy is about to drive over. Those big search engine companies that also happen to sell ads are, like, gonna have to pivot hard.
Newspapers could have made their own "Craigslist". They just didn't want to learn anything about internet technology or how it could shape the media landscape.
They did not want any computer science people in the company boards or top management level.
Their articles are still written in the same style as when paper ruled. We still only get 1 or 2 photos per article even when it's easy to snap 10-20 photos.
We don't get links to other sites. Articles that says "Apple's press release announced xyz" never links to the press release.
True. I built a web site for a local newspaper back in the late 90s. Their main concern was finding a way to charge for the content (difficult at that time) while making sure they didn't give anything away for free, so they did nothing useful with it for a long time.
That paper still survives, barely, ironically having cut back on home delivery and trying to push customers toward digital, while losing a lot of the content that made it worth getting in the first place.
I agree with everything you said, but don't underestimate the fact that we have been trained by the past couple hundred years to consume news in that way. News presented in a logical way would probably be off-putting to some huge segment of the public because it wouldn't carry the proper ritual air of "seriousness." Seriousness looks like a newspaper article.
For a related illustration: It's extremely dumb that Wikipedia has continued with the Voice of God tone that it borrowed from encyclopedias, for example, especially when people know that it is often edited by dimwits (and by purpose is open for any idiot to edit.) Encyclopedias had to pretend to be the Voice of God because you would only own one. That one would have cost as much as your living room sofa. It wasn't written by incel assholes, but people with lots of letters after their names who you assumed wore clean white coats.
Wikipedia doesn't have to pretend. Encyclopedias had limited space, so they had to leave out a lot. Wikipedia doesn't. Encyclopedias had to be conservative in what they included, because people were investing millions to print them, and once they were printed, you didn't get to change them. Wikipedia can print tons of things that turn out to be falsehoods, and balance them later with the articles that show them to be falsehoods.
The fact that Wikipedia doesn't feel obligated to include all primary or secondary sources that can be legally included is insane. Wikipedia should be nothing but a guide to sources, and the narrative linking those sources should be explaining their taxonomy of ideas; how they relate to and contradict one another, where ideas were introduced or expanded, etc. Instead, it's really obsessed with telling me who is "right-wing." Because as a Voice of God, it can't help but abuse its authority. Its addiction to that power is why it does not change, and why governments, NGOs, and random companies have found it so useful to control.
The reality is that it's working well for both the newspapers and Wikipedia. As entrenched institutions distributing knowledge through printing presses, their primary motivation after being obsoleted by information technology transforms into preventing the distribution of knowledge, and of casting aspersions on the quality of knowledge from other sources. Wikipedia basically says: "There are two kinds of sources, bad and good. The bad sources will hurt you. We include all of the good sources. There's no reason to go anywhere else."
They might as well include: "Therefore, we are worth the price of a sofa." They sort of still do, but now that pitch is made to intelligence agencies and weird foundations. And it's about owning that Voice. If you're not paying for Wikipedia, it means you're the product.
The reason online newspapers don't have links is because they don't want you to read the sources. They want you to passively accept what they are saying as true. Just like modern newspapers always have. To simply inform people would destroy their core value proposition, which is keeping people from being informed by others. They're not trying to expand the newspaper market in general, they're trying to expand their share.
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e.g. If there's a widespread conspiracy theory quasi-religion that has people feeding their children gravel will get rid of their autism, Wikipedia wouldn't think it should link to the publications of the people promulgating the theory, describe schisms between different groups of gravel-eaters, and the theory's apostates. It thinks it should spend a bunch of time telling me that they are right-wing, and that right-wingers do crazy things, and that everybody agrees that no one should eat gravel. If I'm lucky, I might get the name of somebody involved. At the bottom I'll get related links to "cults" "list of crazy right-wing beliefs." On the talk page: "Eating gravel to cure autism is insane and doesn't deserve the attention; can we just merge this into the 'Demographics of Trump Supporters' page?"
Reading Wikipedia I get the same feeling I get when you read histories from the middle ages or antiquity where they're describing something, let's say a card game, but seemingly have no interest in the rules. They describe the strategies being used, but leave out how many cards they played with and tons of other details. There's no way you could reconstruct it. It's because those histories were written by elites as a way of saying something like "the local peasants had a lot of color, and were smarter than one would think!" A romantic value judgement, a sign of approval or disapproval, not a description of what was in front of them, but a description of their feelings about it.
Thanks to those scribes, hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people could play the same card game for decades; it could be written about a dozen times; and to this day we may still not know how it was played. The fact that cultural elites can't see past their own eqos destroys history. Yet Wikipedia soldiers on, slowly becoming more entrenched in government than an encyclopedia ever was. Pretending to be authoritative. A zombie from the 50s, when a set of books sold door to door could contain all the information in the world.
sorry for the essay everyone, am procrastinating...
Traditional journalism has had lots of pinpricks and the article doesn't really refute that Craigslist was almost certainly one of those--and maybe a fairly big one for big city papers in the US. I expect it's also a radical oversimplification to suggest that Craigslist alone decimated newspapers.
I'd say it most certainly killed the sort of dedicated small print classified ad publications you'd find at store checkout counters. But maybe those small pubs like The Want Advertiser (in Boston) were few and far between.
These things were everywhere, my hometown of 20k had TWO papers, one was a weekly and the town next door had one. And then even in a big city, you would have neighborhood level papers with a little news, some ads, etc.
They are all gone. Many of them folding before the internet became popular.
I with I had a local newspaper. I don't have time to attend my city meetings what with raising my kids, and even if i did make time school board and library board meetings are often the same night so I can't attend them all. The city minutes are published - debated [some obscure issue] before voting to pass 3-2. Nothing more like what positions were debated who supported it or why/why not. So I have no clue on if I should reelect anyone or not. Similiar for all the other meetings, I need a summory of the detail that I can't get.
there is the msa level papers but they don't get local enough. There is county today which publishes the minutes but not the important details. Real reporting is important and I can't find it for local issues. Anyone can report on national issues and I can still find that, but not local.
The main cost today to host a site is bandwidth and electricity. Many small cities could host their own craigslist without Facebook ads. there wouldn't be as much bandwidth.
I was surprised by that part too. I always assumed that Craig was a young techy person.
My takeaway from this article:
- Craiglist was launched by a 40-year old, ex-IBM enginner. It started out as an online list for his circle of friends.
- The main competitor then was "Classifieds" section in newspapers. Craigslist out-competed them by simply being a better medium (No word-count limit + photo support).
- Meanwhile, newspaper executives failed to respond in a meaning manner. By 2010, 70% of their classified ad business was gone.
Craig seems to be fully retired by now, focusing on his philanthropy work, which I think is awesome.
Readit News
It suggests the newspaper funding model was already broken — they just didn't know it until the internet came along.
Of course by my own fucked up logic then any enterprise making money based on advertisements is on a precarious footing since no one engages in their business for the ads.
Deleted Comment
They did not want any computer science people in the company boards or top management level.
Their articles are still written in the same style as when paper ruled. We still only get 1 or 2 photos per article even when it's easy to snap 10-20 photos.
We don't get links to other sites. Articles that says "Apple's press release announced xyz" never links to the press release.
That paper still survives, barely, ironically having cut back on home delivery and trying to push customers toward digital, while losing a lot of the content that made it worth getting in the first place.
For a related illustration: It's extremely dumb that Wikipedia has continued with the Voice of God tone that it borrowed from encyclopedias, for example, especially when people know that it is often edited by dimwits (and by purpose is open for any idiot to edit.) Encyclopedias had to pretend to be the Voice of God because you would only own one. That one would have cost as much as your living room sofa. It wasn't written by incel assholes, but people with lots of letters after their names who you assumed wore clean white coats.
Wikipedia doesn't have to pretend. Encyclopedias had limited space, so they had to leave out a lot. Wikipedia doesn't. Encyclopedias had to be conservative in what they included, because people were investing millions to print them, and once they were printed, you didn't get to change them. Wikipedia can print tons of things that turn out to be falsehoods, and balance them later with the articles that show them to be falsehoods.
The fact that Wikipedia doesn't feel obligated to include all primary or secondary sources that can be legally included is insane. Wikipedia should be nothing but a guide to sources, and the narrative linking those sources should be explaining their taxonomy of ideas; how they relate to and contradict one another, where ideas were introduced or expanded, etc. Instead, it's really obsessed with telling me who is "right-wing." Because as a Voice of God, it can't help but abuse its authority. Its addiction to that power is why it does not change, and why governments, NGOs, and random companies have found it so useful to control.
The reality is that it's working well for both the newspapers and Wikipedia. As entrenched institutions distributing knowledge through printing presses, their primary motivation after being obsoleted by information technology transforms into preventing the distribution of knowledge, and of casting aspersions on the quality of knowledge from other sources. Wikipedia basically says: "There are two kinds of sources, bad and good. The bad sources will hurt you. We include all of the good sources. There's no reason to go anywhere else."
They might as well include: "Therefore, we are worth the price of a sofa." They sort of still do, but now that pitch is made to intelligence agencies and weird foundations. And it's about owning that Voice. If you're not paying for Wikipedia, it means you're the product.
The reason online newspapers don't have links is because they don't want you to read the sources. They want you to passively accept what they are saying as true. Just like modern newspapers always have. To simply inform people would destroy their core value proposition, which is keeping people from being informed by others. They're not trying to expand the newspaper market in general, they're trying to expand their share.
-----
e.g. If there's a widespread conspiracy theory quasi-religion that has people feeding their children gravel will get rid of their autism, Wikipedia wouldn't think it should link to the publications of the people promulgating the theory, describe schisms between different groups of gravel-eaters, and the theory's apostates. It thinks it should spend a bunch of time telling me that they are right-wing, and that right-wingers do crazy things, and that everybody agrees that no one should eat gravel. If I'm lucky, I might get the name of somebody involved. At the bottom I'll get related links to "cults" "list of crazy right-wing beliefs." On the talk page: "Eating gravel to cure autism is insane and doesn't deserve the attention; can we just merge this into the 'Demographics of Trump Supporters' page?"
Reading Wikipedia I get the same feeling I get when you read histories from the middle ages or antiquity where they're describing something, let's say a card game, but seemingly have no interest in the rules. They describe the strategies being used, but leave out how many cards they played with and tons of other details. There's no way you could reconstruct it. It's because those histories were written by elites as a way of saying something like "the local peasants had a lot of color, and were smarter than one would think!" A romantic value judgement, a sign of approval or disapproval, not a description of what was in front of them, but a description of their feelings about it.
Thanks to those scribes, hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people could play the same card game for decades; it could be written about a dozen times; and to this day we may still not know how it was played. The fact that cultural elites can't see past their own eqos destroys history. Yet Wikipedia soldiers on, slowly becoming more entrenched in government than an encyclopedia ever was. Pretending to be authoritative. A zombie from the 50s, when a set of books sold door to door could contain all the information in the world.
sorry for the essay everyone, am procrastinating...
Dead Comment
The Swiss army chainsaw saw some things.
Probably deliberately so, as it was cannibalising eBay.
They are all gone. Many of them folding before the internet became popular.
there is the msa level papers but they don't get local enough. There is county today which publishes the minutes but not the important details. Real reporting is important and I can't find it for local issues. Anyone can report on national issues and I can still find that, but not local.
B) newspapers were decimated in country X
Conclusion: ???
Just because a country didn't have Craig's List, there's similar services all over the place reducing ad revenue.
My takeaway from this article:
- Craiglist was launched by a 40-year old, ex-IBM enginner. It started out as an online list for his circle of friends.
- The main competitor then was "Classifieds" section in newspapers. Craigslist out-competed them by simply being a better medium (No word-count limit + photo support).
- Meanwhile, newspaper executives failed to respond in a meaning manner. By 2010, 70% of their classified ad business was gone.
Craig seems to be fully retired by now, focusing on his philanthropy work, which I think is awesome.