14 Comments Add your own

• 1. tdc  |  July 14th, 2008 at 6:15 pm

  the little bit i know about craig, i’d guess he’d say to have at it.

  although using the words “your fault” really shouldn’t be pointed @ craigslist, but rather back at those execs. that spent years (and continue) bashing it.

• 2. Anonymous  |  July 14th, 2008 at 6:22 pm

  Wow, what a bunch of second-rate ideas. They mostly revolve around the idea of diluting Craigslist to artificially prop up a crappy product.

  Maybe the newspapers should stop begging Craig to do what they want and start actually competing with him. Maybe they could, oh I don’t know, take ten minutes and try to figure out WHY people prefer Craigslist?

  I can’t help but think that the newspapers are drowning in the Internet — they’re violently flailing about, hoping that someone will come rescue them, but nobody wants to for fear of being pulled down with them.

• 3. Mike  |  July 14th, 2008 at 6:40 pm

  Dear Fellow Business Owner

  People love your product and not ours. Would it be alright if we steal your free product and sell it ourselves for a profit (via ads and subscriptions). And how about we profit again from your success by allowing people to post ads on your site but through our website instead. And how about we abuse you a third time by adding our news product to your popular site, bloating it up with content visitors didn’t come for and which simply links visitors away from your site in the end. I know this sounds like lowly panhandling but it’s not. You see, my business broke down just a few miles down the road and all I need is a little money for gas.

  ———————————-

  Greedy businesses never got it. In the late 1990’s Charlotte used to have a website with an extremely strong brand that offered free community-type ads to everybody in the community, just like Craig’s List. It was the most popular site in the city by far. Then they decided the community ads wouldn’t be free anymore and 90% of the traffic vanished overnight. The domain still exists but that brand is now dead.

• 4. Cory Bergman  |  July 14th, 2008 at 9:09 pm

  I posted this in the Poynter discussion group, where Steve Outing first posted the letter:

  I haven’t responded to this list in years. Two points.

  The first is what others have written. Newspapers ignored the threat and failed to adapt
  to their users’ needs. Craigslist was a well-known entity in the industry when it was
  just a San Francisco startup (I remember blogging about it and urging TV stations to copy
  the idea). But the idea of “free” was preposterous. Classic business case of a cash cow
  industry with little direct competition facing transformational change.

  The second is less obvious, especially for journalists. The retrenchment of newspapers
  will not spell the end of quality journalism. It will just change it. For example, here
  in Seattle, neighborhood blogs are popping up all over the place. WestSeattleBlog.com,
  run by two journalists who quit their mainstream media jobs, breaks more stories about
  the West Seattle neighborhood than all the traditional media organizations in Seattle
  COMBINED. They’ve reached a half-million monthly page views in a single Seattle
  neighborhood. They’ve revolutionized news at its most relevant level. (And yes, the
  site is packed full of paying advertisers.)

  Traditionalist journalists scoff that the West Seattle Blog isn’t quality journalism.
  Then they punch up the site twice a day for story ideas.

  The void will be filled, because the demand remains. Quality journalism will prevail,
  with or without Craigslist. But the business model will ultimately adapt. You can count
  on it.

  Cory

• 5. Don Day  |  July 14th, 2008 at 10:04 pm

  Wah. Wah wah wah wah.

  Shut up and find a new way to do business.

  Craig won’t take a single one of these suggestions - nor should they.

  It isn’t Craigslist that is causing a death spiral for newspapers. It is the NEWSPAPERS. They got away with charging a thousand bucks for a stinking job ad for far too long. Now the days of screwing people over… are over.

  Will there be less hard-charging journalism from old white guys sitting at a desk making phone calls? Yes.

  But the new world of hundreds of bloggers and citizen journalists puzzling things together will uncover more news anyway.

• 6. Amanda E.  |  July 15th, 2008 at 2:14 am

  Someone call the wahmbulance, we’ve got a critical crier on our hands.

  There is nothing stopping the Podunk Press from starting their own craigslist clone. Except for the fear of failure.

  All feeding off of Craigslist means that they have someone outside the building to point fingers at and blame if the “partnership” fails.

  God forbid a paper (or TV station for that matter) tries something new and novel on the internet via their own initiative instead of latching onto someone else’s success. And having the balls to take ownership if an idea didn’t work or you screwed up in promoting it instead of playing the blame game and pointing fingers at outside sites.

  ==========================
  Oh, and the line that partnering with Craigslist is going to save democracy and journalism. Yea right, I needed a good laugh tonight.

  I worked for many years in public education - the failure of the creation of civic minded citizens started long ago with the rise of standardized and high stakes testing.

  Kids are no longer being taught civics in public schools and they grow up being apathetic about community issues, politics, etc - and by extension, quite frankly don’t give a rats arse about what gets published in your paper or aired on your newscasts. As far as they know, it doesn’t affect them, so why bother to read/watch. Those very same kids are your potential up and coming audiences.

  Instead they are being taught only what’s on the state tests so that district can get more money from the state or prevent funds from being taken away. Heck I’ve watched local districts identify students - including a relative of mine - who would bring down the district’s AYP score and force them to drop out instead. They even go so far as to help them sign up for welfare too.

  [sarcasm on]
  Yep, there’s a bunch of future civic-minded adults being educated right there, and I’m sure when they are adults and out in the real world, they’ll watch the evening news and subscribe to the local paper. Why, they learned that being civic minded and knowing what is going on in their respective communities was important when they were growing up.
  [sarcasm off]

  Crying about Craigslist isn’t going to save journalism as you all know it. You need to look at what broke in your respective communities that turned your audience away instead of pontificating over and over “woe is me”.

  You can report stories that win Pulitzers, duPonts and Murrows - but they are nothing more than worthless chunks of metal and plastic in the end if there is no audience that even cares enough to read or watch your product.

• 7. Brink  |  July 15th, 2008 at 4:35 am

  What possible reason could Craiglist have to do any of the things suggested?

  It isn’t their job to help save an industry that got itself into trouble.

• 8. Nick  |  July 15th, 2008 at 6:56 am

  Newspapers should look to Craigslist for its ease of use too. Good god, so many papers’ Web classifieds are convoluted and hard to search (and seemingly designed like it was 1995.)

• 9. ljones  |  July 15th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

  I interned at a newspaper in 1999. They were so damn oblivious to what was about to go down. I tried to clue them in, you know the young college kid with new ideas. They weren’t trying to hear it.

  I yelled InDesign, they yelled Quark.

  They could have created a network of classifieds that had greater reach back then. Yet they encouraged me to by the paper and show support.

  Tons of good people in that industry were forced out due to computers yet they lost due to lack of using the technology in a beneficial manner.

• 10. Steve  |  July 15th, 2008 at 1:19 pm

  Best line of the letter is, “I’ll agree that it’s not directly your fault.”

  Translation — “You guys took what we did and improved on it. We didn’t adapt to new technology, but because you did, you suck!”

• 11. Rob  |  July 15th, 2008 at 5:42 pm

  Everyone else has said pretty much not so good ideas. I’ll just pile on.

  Newspapers are broken. The way things are going the fix the flagship papers may be willing to stomach may come too late to save them.

  The only newspapers that will survive I think are the small market weeklies and daily in remote corners of the country. For those communities they are an offline version of the “West Seattle Blog.” Small weeklies and dailies do neighborhood news really well and those are in the best position to survive.

• 12. Anonymous  |  July 16th, 2008 at 10:36 am

  Japan kills the US electronics industry. Still have electronics but Motorola is falling apart like a leper 40 years later because they weren’t that smart anyway, a different blog altogether

  “Datsun Saves” They did in 1974. Unfortunately in 2008 nobody can truly forecast which companies or even the countries economies that will survive this fiasco we live in.

  Newspapers and broadcasters along with record and movie/TV resisted the internet like broccoli as I see it until it nearly hurt. Newspapers were the last to get it and they are still stuck in the ‘we sell ink” mode.

  OF COURSE there is no need for half a dozen newspapers anymore-morning/afternoon/multiple edition or otherwise. When there was no internet you could still make a living based on your services, advertising rates, coverage…broadcasters then wanted to impart that they were as good as the newspaper. Radio had local news but it wasn’t trying to be “the paper”. Radio stations owned a number of TV stations and crosspromoted, often shared personnel.

  Newspapers were going away perhaps as early as the FIFTIES and they ignored it. Anywhere the TV market was large, innovative and young there suddenly were too many papers.

  Now there is TOO MUCH TV because of the GROSS OVERLOAD and CROSSPOLLINATION that threatens to reduce the Internet to CABLE II.

  Beware that! Overload signals the tapering, degradation, decline and outright dismantling of a popular format.

  OR A COUNTRY.

• 13. Contrarian  |  July 17th, 2008 at 5:20 am

  “I interned at a newspaper in 1999. They were so damn oblivious to what was about to go down. I tried to clue them in, you know the young college kid with new ideas. They weren’t trying to hear it.”

  And now, you’re a multimillionaire, right? Because you were so far ahead of the curve, you were able to predict what to do and you did it.

  Right?

• 14. Contrarian  |  July 17th, 2008 at 5:25 am

  “Beware that! Overload signals the tapering, degradation, decline and outright dismantling of a popular format.

  OR A COUNTRY.”

  How does one go about getting “overload” of a country/

Leave a Comment

Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed