Our Beautiful Future of Public Corruption, Brought to You by Craigslist
"The Rise of Craigslist and How It's Killing Your Newspaper"
This is old news, and it's also the last news, as New York Magazine described it way back in 2006, when most of the army of idiots who elected Barack Obama and the other army of idiots who wanted Sarah Palin instead were still sleeping peacefully in political indifference.
And it was already old news even as far back as 2004, when Barack Obama was still an insignificant state senator in Illinois, and Sarah Palin was nobody.
"Craigslist costing newspapers millions," screamed CNN
In San Francisco alone, newspapers lost $65 million in ad revenue, and San Francisco and Denver and Minneapolis and Cleveland and Philadelphia started firing reporters and editors and researchers and didn't stop until it got very dark in city halls all across America.
Now nobody covers city hall, except in New York and two or three similar venues, and even in New York almost nobody covers crime, and after four or five years of blissful ignorance, didn't the public wake up one day with news so big that even the internet noticed it!
The economy had collapsed! Trillions of dollars had simply disappeared, and nobody knew or knows now or will ever know where it went, because the professional reporters who knew the players and read the playbook have disappeared, too.
So when Henry Paulson screamed for $700 billion now, because... "Don't even ask! You wouldn't understand it even if I bothered to explain it to you!"
He was right.
You can't "follow the money!" You don't know where the TARP money went, or the trillions and trillions that the Federal Reserve poured on top of TARP.
You don't even know what Obama did with all that money that you gave him. $750 million in campaign donations, from the little people of the internet. $750 million from the high society of the "information society." What a pathetic joke!
In 2004, Bush/Cheney raised $260 million, and in 2008 Obama raised almost three times as much as Bush/Cheney. Where did it go? Look it up on the internet, if you can find a few details, and forget about verifying anything.
So the "information society" nominated Sarah Palin and Barack Obama, and that was a national election! Sarah Palin and Barack Obama were national candidates, and if those two pigs-in-a-poke can contest the White House, what the heck happens in local elections?
You don't know. You won't ever know, because all those reporters who watched your back generation after generation are gone. The reporters who noticed when a councilman's wife bought a brand new fur coat are gone. The reporters who noticed a Patek Philippe Calatrava watch on the wrist of a building inspector are gone.
This is the first bequest of the Millenial Genetration, the Internet Generation, to all future generations, after so many bullshit bequests from the Boomers. This is the generation that killed newspapers with the ridiculous little convenience of Craigslist, and that's what the internet really signifies for American politics.
All the rest is idle chatter.
October 18, 2009 10:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
And now for the good news...
October 18, 2009 11:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is so godawful sad. We could have done better, should have done better.
Do tell me what criagslist has to do with lost papers. Isn't it just classified ads? I plead utter ignorance; damn; it's getting to be a habit. Or don't tell me, and i will google it in the morning. G'night.
October 19, 2009 12:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
But Ruta, the newspapers were going under before Craigslist. Not only that, but they sucked. They had been taking reporters off the news beat for years and focusig on fashion, style, gossip, etc... This all occured because of the corporate ownership craze that bought up almost all the newspapers that count in America. They saw a cash cow and wanted to milk it. Problem was they paid almost any asking price for those papers just as the internet was rising and other forms of advertising were also becoming available to those who used to buy ads regularly. Profit is the enemy, in the end, even of the profiteers.
Good post!
October 19, 2009 1:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're right about the corporatization of newspapers before Craigslist, oleeb. Newspapers that were returning a profit of over 20% on capital stated laying off reporters in the Nineties!
20% profit!
Layoffs!
Greed and stupidity, always and forever the only infinite qualities of the Universe!
October 19, 2009 3:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
But still, even in 1999, there were relatively few layoffs, compared to the flood in the last ten years, because...
That's a very peculiar bit of analysis, but the bottom line was... strong sales of classified ads.
There's also an interesting note about afternoon newspapers disappearing in the Eighties here.
So newspapers were ailing before Craigslist, but it still really mattered when somebody sneaked up to the hospital bed and beat the patient's brains out with a hammer, and that somebody was Craigslist.
October 19, 2009 4:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think it worthwhile to expend resources working up a sweat about any change which through a normal and very predictable evolutionary process will happen no matter what.
It'd be wiser to expend resources learning how the new paradigm works and then devise and implement methods suited to your particular need. The step you are going through is non-productive.
Maybe the non-productive step is necessay but it should be as brief as possible.
One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.
There, I'm done.
Now lets get on with it. Learn the new shit. And kick some ass.
October 19, 2009 8:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
thepeoplechoose wants to "expend resources learning how the new paradigm works," as if there were any such thing as a "new paradigm," or any chance that this non-existent "paradigm" could work.
And of course thepeoplechoose can't even offer a minimal description of his or her bullshit fantasy-paradigm.
This bullshit "paradigm" is like a "paradigm" of medicine where there are no doctors or nurses, and somehow...
...someday...
...somebody...
...will figure it all out again.
But the kind of reporting that kept most city halls reasonably honest for most of the Twentieth Century can't be an amateur part-time job, any more than medicine can be an amateur part-time job, because (for one example out of zillions) it's exactly the sort of micro-fluctuations in the normal flow of events that tells the whole story of city hall, just like it's relatively small fluctations in the human body that tell most of the story of medicine.
"Gee whiz! I think the normal temperature is supposed to be 90 degrees, or 92 degrees, or somewhere in that range, and maybe you feel a little warmer... or colder. Or whatever."
But exactly because so many people quit reading the local news, and turned into TV junkies, almost nobody has any idea what was really involved in reporting on city halls.
If you're ignorant enough about any profession, you may "think" that anybody could do it, and all you need for a "new paradigm" is an army of bullshitters just like yourself, shooting off their mouths about subjects they don't even dimly understand.
But if you try to imagine an entity capable of reporting on city hall, you will inevitably arrive at an entity exactly like a full-time professional city-hall reporter, and now...
There ain't no such entity.
October 19, 2009 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
You make sense, but you're a jerk about it.
October 19, 2009 3:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
My apologies, that wasn't called for. I just have a hard time reconciling the wisdom of what you say with the manner in which its delivered.
It's a human nature thing. Persuasion requires more than just being right all the time, though that helps.
October 19, 2009 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
You should also check out the comment to which I replied, where thepeoplechoose dismisses my diary as a waste of time ("The step you are going through is non-productive.") and even counts down how much time my subject deserves...
So what came back was disrespect for disrespect, with exactly the difference which you kindly mentioned, that I still took the time to think about the comment itself, and anwered the substance of it as fully as I could.
October 19, 2009 4:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you think change is going to stand by and wait for you to catch up or if you aren't able to accept it you are well and truly screwed.
October 19, 2009 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
So far there are no substitutes for reporters and that the citizens are well and truly screwed is precisely the point of Rootie's post.
October 19, 2009 11:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
But they don't have to be. That they are is a choice people make. In my particular city we had two dailes when I was a kid and now we have one and like most small metro areas the breadth of print coverage has dwidled along with ad revenues.
It has been replaced with a lively blog covering all manner of local stuff, including what goes on in the mayors office etc. The bolg is a feature of somecityname.com. The somecityname.com is the same as many cities where the somecityname is the name of your city. And guess what? The variety, the quality and the amount of information that creeps into that blog well exceeds anything the print dailies ever provided. This is the same nationwide.
The public, without question, is a winner in this. But if you want to partake of the winnings you have to participate. Which means you have to be willing to extend yourself ever so slightly and do something a little bit different. Those who can't or won't are those same ones who are inflexible in other ways and who limit our possibilities.
So, as I stated in my first post in this blog, this is purely a paradigm change. That change is only of consequence if we want it to be. And it can be better that what we had. If we want it to be.
October 20, 2009 3:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Newspapers started slipping when shareholders began calling the shots in the acquisition/conglomerate-crazy '80s. "News" is not sexy to shareholders; money is sexy.
Apparently the lesson that shareholders are dumbfucks needs to be learned over and over again until every business in the country collapses.
October 19, 2009 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
It would also help if corporate media hadn't been preaching easy money for everybody for the last 50 years, and developing expectations which cannot be realized for most people even in the short term.
I can't really blame the average investor for most of what happens on Wall Street, any more than I blame the average gambler for Las Vegas. Wall Street and Vegas exploit human weakness, and all of us are weak.
October 19, 2009 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
We may be weak-willed, but that's why we have a brain. I'm not talking about "average investors."
When newspaper companies began buying other companies they had absolutely no expertise in, it was only a matter of time before they found themselves coming up short.
This has been true of media companies across the board. We have been watching the too-big-to-succeed experiment for the last 15-20 years now. How much time do we need to learn from mistakes? Apparently, we need more time because we are weak?
I used to work for Simon & Schuster, which was part of Viacom at the time. S&S is for sale: Wanna buy it? No one wants it; it's been for sale since 1998. I bet you can get it for a song.
I left S&S to work at Random House, the largest English-language trade publisher in the world. I remember a fake press release pinned up near the copy machine in my department: Random House to buy the Vatican.
This is how America operates in every capacity, from business to health care to politics: Don't fix the problem (for god's sake, don't identify the problem!); just cover up the symptoms and everything will be fine.
October 19, 2009 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Indeed they are dunbfucks with one single thing on their minds to the exclusion of all else, and now that the rest has been excluded, what will they have? A whole lot of worthless money.
October 19, 2009 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yep. Myopic shareholder capitalism killed newspapers. Hell they were still creating these crazy deals in 07 when Zell destroyed the storied tribune company with insane debt. Newspapers had decades to get ready for the internet and the threat to classified revenues. If it wasn't craigslist it would have been someone else. In my more conspiratorial moods I wonder if it wasn't planned (maybe not myopic afterall).
I guess I am left hoping that new orgs like TPM, CIRm=, Propublica, etc. work out.
October 20, 2009 11:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is an awesome video, Saladin! I particularly love the wired red phone!
By the way, the article about Craig Newmark that Rootie linked to above is also awesome—except for the obnoxious full-screen ad that interrupts your reading whenever you click to the next page. But it is worth the aggravation to read to the end (and I don't even remember what the ad is for). Newmark provides an interesting lesson about commerce.
October 21, 2009 12:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
I was intrigued by the quote that "of the estimated 2000 home computer owners in the bay area...". 28 years later... wow!
October 21, 2009 12:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah- I think it somewhat relates to your blog today. One reason why despite the crisis our leadership (and the population at large) is resistant to change our corporate overlord system is that it has actually been a good system in many ways. It is an understandable sentiment. Abominable here we come!
October 21, 2009 1:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
First we've got to fight over the freedom of the internet, then 'abominable here we come'. ;)
October 21, 2009 1:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the tip. I confess I didn't read it as I went to a lecture by Craig himself at UC Berkeley journalism school a year ago so I feel I have a pretty good grounding in the argument.
October 21, 2009 12:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
So what do we do, Rootie? I don't think there is a viable for-profit *business* model for this local kind of civic news. Sure, shareholders are stupid, journalists themselves have their heads in the sand, etc.
But this stuff was always a loss-making public service provided by newspapers before their broader business model went in the crapper. The best local coverage here in Geneva is Le Courrier, which unlike bigger papers is not a viable business. It basically survives on donations. I.e. it's a charity. It seems to me its got to be that or either public subsidy that keeps this kind of journalism alive...
October 19, 2009 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't know you lived in Geneva! I spent one beautiful summer in Annecy, when I was just a kid, and still hope to return.
I more or less exhausted my intellectual energy identifying the problem with local news, but since you ask, I'll try to rustle up a few thoughts about what to do now.
(Time passes.)
(More time passes.)
Okay, I'll give it a shot.
My bright idea is...
Bounties!
Pay whoever discovers public corruption a bounty on a fixed percentage of what the crime cost the public. And likewise for whistle-blowers, who aren't really protected in spite of a mass of legislation supposed to protect them.
Since public corruption can quickly run up into billions, it's credible to me that an army of speculative investigators would materialize wherever public money was at risk.
If you even get 5% of the boodle, it could pay off like a lottery!
October 19, 2009 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nice!
Though it somewhat inconveniently leaves untouched all the 'legal' corruption which you need a fourth estate watchdog for...
Yeah, Geneva. I've been back and forth for a number of years, and now settled for awhile. you amaze me - you've been everywhere...
Annecy is still a beautiful little fairy-tale town. Nearest place for some decent French cooking!
October 19, 2009 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Decent" and "French" in the same sentence.
I'm sure that sounded more sane spoken with a Swiss accent, but in ENGLISH?
October 19, 2009 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
ROTFLOL - the man from the land of deep-fried mars bars, the invention of sheep innards wrapped in...sheep innards, pickled eggs, the alternative four food groups (potatoes, chips, gravy, beer)... wants to talk cooueeezeen?!?!
October 19, 2009 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Now now Obey, if nothing else, I'm open-minded and unprejudiced about these things. I have NO doubt that French cooking is entirely satisfactory to their needs. I would only note that the "needs" of the French appear to include (in order): compulsive lying, low-level thievery, impotence, rank cowardice and a complete lack of self-discipline.
Oh. And no musical sense.
Rather, I was REFERRING to the use of the word "decent" adjacent to the word "French" - nothing to do with their cookery. It is simply that there are some words which cannot be used in close proximity to each other. At least, not when conversing amongst other, civilized, folk.
Please pass the potatoes.
October 19, 2009 6:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I like it!
P.S.
Ever been to Zofingen?
October 19, 2009 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I had never even heard of Zofingen before now, so I googled around and discovered Erich von Däniken among its famous citizens.
Did some of your distant ancestors arrive from other planets, mjshep? I assume that only a mouth with mandibles can pronounce your pseudonym.
Zofingen looks like a beautiful little town, from the images I could find, with a kind of "Brigadoon" quality. It must be very peaceful.
The Swiss side of my family originated in Berne, and even the name, "Berne," has a musical resonance for me, believe it or not, because of the way so many old relations always pronounce it.
October 19, 2009 2:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Holy SH***T! Rootie, you're part watch-winder, cheese-eating, live-and-let-kill, none-of-my-business-other-than-your-banking-fees, SWISS?!
What's you're other half then?! Righteous Screaming banshee fury of Justice...? I'm just trying to imagine the kind of blend that produces your particular uniqueness...
(And, I mean that in the best way, as you know...)
;0)
p.s. never heard of Zofingen, though there's a student fraternity of that name (wankers).
October 19, 2009 4:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Berne fraction is German transplants, more like Nietzsche in Basel than William Tell at Morgarten. They still speak Hochdeutsche, and don't yodel.
October 19, 2009 6:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hmmmm, the yodelling joke.. or the German sense of humour joke... hmmmm.
Ok ok.
So these 3 turnips walk into a bar....
October 19, 2009 7:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
One turnip says to the other two turnips, "There's a rave over at Rootie's place Saturday night", and the other turnips.....
October 21, 2009 1:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
I just want to endorse this comment.
October 21, 2009 12:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Newspapers started losing ground when cable TV was introduced. They've been in decline ever since. There have been occasional articles chronicling this decline for two decades.
This is nothing more than an evolutionary change of how information and news is distributed. Getting bent out of shape over this is nuts. And it certainly isn't a surprise. Jeesh.
October 19, 2009 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf4eu5y0418&feature=PlayList&p=034AB3582A99B719&index=7
October 19, 2009 6:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hark! I think it's about to Scotch and Soda!
October 19, 2009 6:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
HOT FLASH! It is the year 1441, and there is....
Yet another scandal:
Our Beautiful, Handwritten books, Brought to Ruin by the Printing Press!
We should put a stop to this now. But how? Must write a page or two about this, but how to get it circulated? Hmmmmmmmmm
October 19, 2009 7:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
PS. Craig's list is easy and free. How can a newspaper that has paid ads compete with that? I'm not saying they couldn't -- they would just have to be forward thinking enough to figure it out.
October 19, 2009 8:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
If one way of making money suffers an untimely death, I am confident those who made money before under that previous scheme will eventually figure out how to make money under the new scheme.
The proponents of capitalism who gripe about the loss of revenue etc seem to have conveniently forgotten their own mantra of a free marketplace.
You can resist the dynamic but the resources you allocate to resisting will be wasted. The real answer, the only answer is to embrace change. In true fact, there are no practical alternatives. And honestly, I don't see how this could be more obvious.
October 20, 2009 4:24 AM | Reply | Permalink