Did Craigslist Really Kill the Newspaper Industry?

'Did Craigslist drive the downfall of print classifieds?' That's the question asked in a new article from the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies:

'I've always wondered about that,' Newmark said in a Zoom interview July 1. 'I think it had an effect.' But portraying him and the list as torpedoing an otherwise great business model is way overblown, he still believes. Citing an influential essay by Thomas Baekdal, Newmark contends that the root of newspapers' trouble was the loss of readers. 'TV hit hard.... (And) l'm like the folks on 'CSI,' I follow the evidence. That goes back at least to the '60s.'
Bad in itself, the loss also took away newspapers' dominant share of local audiences and ability to charge premium classified ad rates. The slide in circulation looks even worse, Baekdal pointed out, when compared to continued increases in the number of households over the years.
Still, Craigslist came to symbolize the shift. Dozens of other vertical digital sites cropped up, before and after, all offering a deadly competitive pairing of an effective and much cheaper service than newspaper classifieds. Even if Craigslist was just one of many, though, it was arguably Newmark who put a face on the massive disruption... By the early 2000s, newspaper executives had a dawning awareness of the business challenge from Craigslist and similar sites. They took minimal action to meet it...

The biggest response was that three big companies — Knight-Ridder, Tribune and Gannett — bought a copycat of Monster called CareerBuilder... By the time newspapers acted, online classifieds had a full head of steam... By 2010, 70% of the newspaper industry's print classified business was gone. Reliable statistics are no longer kept, but the trend continued over the last 15 years... Newspapers continue to do well only with paid obituaries and legal notices, though the latter is now also under threat by digital startups.

The article cites a 2019 analysis from Peter Zollman, whose AIM Group consultancy has followed the classified business for 25 years. 'Craigslist has often been blamed for killing newspapers, but that's a gross canard. It just isn't true.'
American newspapers stumbled while several well-managed counterparts in places like Scandinavia found ways to prosper, he argued.

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