Craigslist: Threat to Newspaper Industry

Craigslist, basically an online classified database for anything from listings for apartment rentals to afternoon sex hook ups, is threatening the very core of newspaper business, sucking away profitable classified advertisements and cutting into revenue.

You would never think that a shulp like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark would have the power fundamentally hurt the newspaper industry.

Among media mandarins, the list began to resonate a year ago, after a business study in the Bay Area showed that local newspapers were losing as much as $50 million a year in revenue to Craigslist. The awareness of the trend has since avalanched. Classifieds make up as much as 50 percent of big-city newspaper ad revenues, explains newspaper analyst John Morton, and at a time when the newspaper industry is in crisis, with circulations going down by as much as 2.6 percent a year as readers die off and the young go elsewhere for their information, Craigslist has gotten a reputation as the newspaper killer.

At the convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors last spring, two panelists at a session on the crisis in the industry flashed a slide of Newmark and asked the editors how many of them knew who Craig Newmark was. A faint show of hands. Craigslist? A few more.

“The shocking thing is that this was someone who was not only a threat to steal their business but was in the process of doing it,” says Jay Rosen, a blogger (the name of his blog is PressThink) and professor of journalism at NYU. “What industry could survive in which you don’t know the name of the person who is taking away your business? They’re mystified. They don’t know who this guy is and where he came from. And it just shows—that it’s easier for Craig to learn journalism than it is for these guys to learn the Web.”