Huh? Oh yeah! Right ... too bad publishers didn't have the foresight to get is early on web based job sites and and car sales so they could hold on to that revenue.
All of the people here who believe Craigslist siphoned off billions of dollars of classified ads for garage sales and used merchandise are out of their fucking minds.
It wasn’t (just) the general classifieds; it was the big three pillars of Jobs, Cars, and Real Estate moving to Monster, AutoTrader, and Zillow (or whatever we were using 20 years ago)
The general classifieds were pocket change. The real impact happened when 1) the classified advertisers in recruitment, automotive and real estate realized they had the same tools as the newspaper publishers, and 2) the hard reality hit that there is no such thing as local on the Internet.
You're getting a lot of responses from people who seem to understand your precise meaning, but I don't. What am I missing? I know classifieds were a big revenue source for newspapers, Craigslist wrecked them, newspapers now suck, but...hegemony?
Newspaper revenue collapse hollowed out the independent, pro-democracy newsroom and replaced it with an appendages of capital fascism like Bezos and Murdoch, who used the power of the press to push Trump into power through lying to the people. Now Trump has annihilated US world standing.
and with journalism in decline, the $ drain of ad money -> google/fb/tech companies instead of news media is amplified - facebook, google further incentivise clicks, SEO over facts and UX.
and that's how our misinformation environment was born and now dominates
This is partially correct, but it's mainly a cultural pathology endemic to political and opinion journalism. To take WaPo as an example: they were hacking it up for years before Bezos got there. The billionaires and private-equity shops are just exploiting that pre-existing pathology.
Those newspapers were overwhelmingly in favor of the Iraq war, deregulation and welfare reform. They werent worth the paper they were printed on. They discredited themselves and that's why trump won
Classified revenues were one of financial pillars supporting local news, along with subscriptions and advertisements.
Craigslist made classifieds obsolete. Online advertising stole another chunk of revenue. Subscriptions were not enough. Local newspapers got bought out by national chains.
But yeah, the idea of the original post seems to be that a heterogeneous, locally supported news environment was necessary for liberal democracy. Once the national chains took over, they adopted the oligarch's filter, if not outright pushing the oligarch's propaganda.
I guess, but "hegemony" (in what seems like a laudatory sense) seems like a weird word to use there. America could be strong and healthy without being hegemonic.
Perhaps. But the thinking after WW2 was that the best way to support America was to develop a community of like-minded allies around the world. Spreading liberal democracy was ultimately in our own best interest. Hence, hegemony.
Same causality as authoritarian state news channels, but done backwards. In an informed world, the rulers have to own the news to stay rulers, because otherwise the news owners are likely to end up as the rulers.
We had distributed local news ownership, but now it's Bezos, Musk, et al.
The founder of the site in question just reposted this. I can't speak to arguments for or against, but it is interesting. It traces the decline back to the 1960s. Trust in media beginning its decline even before the JFK assassination.
Craig did NOT cause newspapers to have massive profit margins they failed to reinvest in their operations over many decades, a failure of imagination to understand the future, or to ignore every single thing that was told to them (by Ken Doctor and others) in the early to mid 1990s.
The revenue from classified ads helped pay for the operational costs of local newspapers, the backbone of all small-town media. With people now posting on Craigslist for classifieds, all those newspapers disappear, so a lot of people in turn rely on social media for any local news
Classified ads provided newspapers with reliable revenue. Once those ads moved to other websites, newspapers had a difficult time replacing that revenue and laid off staff. The papers shrank. Other "news" sources (read: podcast bros, for example) filled that vacuum, and here we are today...
Lmao I knew it was time to get the fuck out of southern California in 1992 when the San Bernardino Sun classified section started accepting help wanted on porn movie sets. Sunday jobs section used to be 12+ pages and it went down to 1-2
USPS shifting postage rates to make direct mail cheaper than newspaper advertising was the first step to get us on this path. It slashed funding for local news. And I know the guy who designed and implemented that.
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Hm, very interesting theory! As a former print media buyer - newspapers, mags, trade print, direct mail - who joined advertising in 2007, there’s A LOT to this.
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and that's how our misinformation environment was born and now dominates
accurate news -> working liberal democracy -> effective use of soft power -> hegemony
Craigslist made classifieds obsolete. Online advertising stole another chunk of revenue. Subscriptions were not enough. Local newspapers got bought out by national chains.
We had distributed local news ownership, but now it's Bezos, Musk, et al.
I will say, he threw some amazing parties here in SF back in those days. Though it did help to kill the weekly I worked at back then. Along with Match
We were fools.
For zero (0) positions.
The porn set ads and the testing debacle settled it for me. Joined the army and left California.