Newmark Denies Craigslist Is Killing Newspapers 132
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."
Craigslist kills newspapers. So fucking what? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Newspapers: A necessary waste? (Score:4, Interesting)
I hear ya.
The newspaper is stale and (here) it costs more than it is worth. You get little to no news, the only thing worth looking at is the crossword or sudoku. I haven't subscribed to the paper since I moved into my most recent apartment (11 months ago on the new year).
We have a community website that is run by one of the local radio stations... it has fairly "up-to-the-minute" updates and is generally very informative. It's entirely free and funded by advertising from LOCAL businesses. Being a business owner, I've noticed a fairly steady increase in traffic since I've gotten some ads put up.
Re:Newspapers: A necessary waste? (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in civilized countries our paperboys walk up to the front door and shove the papers through our mail slots, or (if we have a mailbox) they shove it into the mailbox.
(Or they dump the papers in the garbage and go back to sleep; I believe this is a cross-cultural thing)
Time is money, if houses are far apart and/or not close to the road a lot of paper delivery people will just throw it in the driveway. I had a job where I did nothing but bring a new newspaper to anyone who called up and said their paper landed in a puddle, snow bank, on their roof, or was missing a section, etc. When people would call up and complain I would suggest they tip their delivery person better. The paper lost a lot of customers. Deliveries were handled by private contractors, thats the free market at work. If your getting $.15 cents a paper you sure can't spend 2 minutes on each one.
But, back on topic, the paper was doing so bad they had meetings with everyone in the company 25 at a time to brainstorm ideas to increase readership or cut costs. Naturally I didn't mention that I, and most in my office, spent the majority of my days reading the paper. Anyway, this graph they showed us plotted a steady decline in readership from the early 90's to the present (early 2004). They were bleeding customers, and probably still are. There were a lot of suggestions (mostly bad), but there isn't much they can do, and besides relentlessly pushing heavily discounted subscriptions, it doesn't seem they've changed much. They do own a rather popular local web portal, so i suppose they are making up some of their losses. Strangely there are many small free papers around still. I guess the newspaper as we know it is still going to be here for a while to come.
Horse-drawn carriage replaces cars; no-one minds (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Newspapers: A necessary waste? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Craigslist kills newspapers. So fucking what? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you need to re-read your Adam Smith.
There are a lot of non-free qualities of the current market, but the two you mention are explicitly pro-free market regulations. The classic purpose of the free market as a concept is to encourage competition. To quote the Wealth of Nations:
"The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion, indeed, but for any considerable time together."
Adam Smith was strongly opposed to the kind of monopolies and cartels that form in a completely unregulated market; he considered the main purpose of government in a free market to be to enforce its competetive nature and to regulate and intervene if and when any market player attempts to prevent that competetive freedom.
Feel free to claim that's not your idea of a 'free market' (or that there are much better examples of actual anti-free market interventions like 'intellectual property' or similar monopoly supporting legislation), but (enforced) free competition is the commonly recognized meaning of the term.