PressEthic

In the 23 November 2006 installment of his weekly blog, Robert X. Cringley argues that Craigslist is the online culprit responsible for the death of the daily newspaper era.

Not Google. Not YouTube. Not the most recent set of all-the-rage blogs.

According to Cringley, Internet news sites like Google News are still heavily reliant upon traditional news sources for content. As a result, they actually feed readers to the websites of the newspapers, magazines, and television stations whose stories they've borrowed. Cringley writes:

"Most Google News entries are from newspapers, magazines, and television stations, while far fewer are Internet-only products like this one. And since Google News links directly back to each of those sites, feeding them readers, if we want to blame any organization for the decline of newspapers, this time it can't be Google, nor any other Internet news site I can think of."

As such, Cringley concludes, we can't blame the likes of Google for the decline of the newspaper era.

But Craigslist's online classified ads, which serve 450 cities and are completely free, are thought to be the reason why many newspapers' classified ad sales have slumped. Often overlooked as a profit center, classified ads are an important source of revenues for newspapers:

"...classified ads aren't as sexy, but they are generally more profitable [than display ads] because there are no sales commissions involved and service and customer hand-holding is minimal, meaning little overhead. It is...modest but extremely lucrative."

It's an interesting idea, made all the more appealing by its very simplicity.

In the midst of our frantic efforts to make sense of newspapers' waning profits and reverse this disturbing trend, we've grasped for big answers, like the theory that new technologies have made it possible to get news from a variety of new media sources (RSS feeds, SMS, blogs, pod casts), changing the way people prefer to access news. In short, this familiar diagnosis implies, new technologies have changed news consumers irrevocably, and the dinosaurs of the printed page best adapt or perish.

The nitty gritty implications of such theories about tidal changes in the media world are difficult to grapple with in the abstract -- and almost impossible to pin down in cause-and-effect relationships. But focusing on following the money, as does Cringley's theory on the rise of Craigslist and the decline in classified ad revenues, certainly has the ring of simple authenticity.

As the Ocham's Razor principle contends, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually correct.