Craigslist Founder Slams U.S. Press, Hints at New Online News Project

[NVMojo]

NEW YORK Saying U.S. newspapers "are afraid to talk truth to power," Craigslist founder Craig Newmark hinted that he's about to launch a major online journalism project within the next few months that will copy the successful "wisdom of the masses" approach to classified advertising and apply it to journalism.

Newmark made his remarks before the Oxford University business school earlier this week, and the British newspaper the Guardian reported the details of his speech on Tuesday.

Craigslist.org has become one of the 50 most-popular sites on the Internet thanks in large part to a community that has arisen around free classifieds. But the free classifieds model Craigslist has helped popularize has also hurt newspapers and cost industry jobs, a fact Newmark owned up to in his speech.

more...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ep/20051123/en_bpiep/craigslistfounderslamsuspresshintsatnewonlinenewsproject

[freeplessinseattle]

1. wonderful! I love craigslist!

interesting article, thanks.

[NJCher]

2. go for it, Craig!

I love it. Anything that can be done to destroy the jerks who have had a headlock on our media is something I will support.

BTW, if you would like to watch the media meltdown, this is a very good blog that I frequent for stats on how people are abandoning the media (sometimes, it seems, in droves). The guy who writes this is the managing editor of Wired. Comments in bold are mine.

http://www.thelongtail.com/the_long_tail/2005/11/mainstream_melt.html

An excerpt:

Mainstream Media Meltdown II
On the occasion of today's gruesome statistics on the continuing fall of newspapers, here's an updated look at mainstream entertainment and media in decline (April's version is here).

Down:


Box Office: down by 7% this year (tickets per capita have fallen every year since 2001).
Newspapers: circulation, which peaked in 1987, is declining faster than ever and is down another 2.6% so far this year.
Music: Sales are down another 5.7% this year; although digital downloads (still just 6% of the business) are climbing nicely.
Radio: down 4% this year alone, continuing a multi-decade decline. I LOVE THIS ONE THE MOST!! The greedy bums ruined radio with all their commercials and now with mp3 players and free music we DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM ANYMORE!!!!

Books: down by 7% in 2004 (but see comments below for discussion)
Mixed:

DVDs: sales growth is slowing dramatically, from 29% last year to single digits this year.
TV: Total viewership is still rising, but as channels proliferate and the audience fragments the rating of the average show continues to decline.
Magazines: Ad revenues are up a bit although the number of ad pages is flat (they're charging more per page). Circulation is also flat, while newsstand sales are at an all-time low.
Videogames: it's the final few months of the current generation of consoles, which tends to the trough of the buying cycle. Sales were down 20% in Sept, but will probably pick up by Christmas with the launch of the Xbox 360.
Up:

Internet advertising:
--Banners: Up 10% this year
--Keywords: Google revenues up 96% and I love this one, too.




Cher

[rumpel]

3. In a related opinion column in the LATimes biz section:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-golden24nov24,1,2619119.column?coll=la-headlines-business

Golden State
Investors Misreading Future of Newspapers
Michael Hiltzik

Many years ago, a veteran editor at what was then the Chandler-owned Los Angeles Times made the following observation about that family and its dividends from this newspaper:

"They're either rolling in it, or they're really rolling in it. And when they're only rolling in it, they start to panic."

The era when insufficiently huge newspaper profits would give the shivers only to the members of a wealthy family seems quaintly distant today. With most major American newspapers, including this one, now owned by publicly traded corporations, the conniptions are more likely to be thrown by Wall Street securities analysts and institutional money managers.

snip

With few ideas about how to grow readership and revenue, publishers have taken the easy path of cutting costs. Tribune Co., Knight Ridder and the New York Times Co. have all reduced staff and shrunk their newspapers. In many of their publications the sports stories are shorter, the national news report skimpier. The city councils of smaller municipalities don't get covered. The editorial pages get planed smooth and positioned delicately on the opinion spectrum so no reader can take any imaginable offense at an identifiable political "tilt."

This can yield marginal gains, for a while. But judging how much to spend on professional news gathering, past a certain threshold, is a subjective exercise. Lawyers are evaluated by their billable hours and garment workers by the piece, but full-time reporters aren't paid by the word. No reliable formula exists for translating a newspaper's literacy, investigative daring, Pulitzer Prizes or (for that matter) political tilt into circulation or advertising revenue. So some publishers will continue to slice away until there's noticeable deterioration in the quality of the product. A few, having reached that point, will keep going until they see an effect on readership and ads.

more at link

the more options the better, I'll be looking forward to the official announcement

[wwcsmd]

4. Cool, thanks.

Here's to Craigslist! And Wikis! SourceForge! Bittorrent! *

Who knew that, right here on the internets, ideas like community and democracy would turn out to be so popular, and functional!

It actually sorta gave me hope for humanity.

(Especially after that year or so when I thought the internet really WAS going to turn out to be all about selling porno banner ads, whew.)

(* Heh, I didn't plan for that to come out sounding like lyrics for a new, computer-geek version of La Vie Boheme. :p )