The replacement for newspapers isn’t Craigslist; it’s local social media.
By Paul Smalera of The Big Money
Much has been made of Craigslist rising up to destroy newspapers’ classified-listings business, but less has been said about newspapers’ own sins in falling behind the needs of their commercial advertisers. For decades, publishers had the luxury of actively disparaging, say, the bra ads that made 10-part Pulitzer Prize reportage possible. But the rise of the Internet, despite taking decades, caught them unprepared. New York University professor and longtime Internet sociologist Clay Shirky recently explained, “When Wal-Mart and the local Maytag dealer … were all able to use [the Internet] to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.”
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