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Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "Craigslist has destroyed that business (classifieds) for the Post and every major paper in the country."

Any and all of those local papers could have done their own online classifieds. They could have charged for the ad and both printed it and put it online so it was searchable. They could have charged for one or the other or both. They could have all collaborated and syndicated their individual classifieds into one big database too.

But they did none of this. They fundamentally didn't understand their own businesses in the face of change. And their businesses are failing as a result.

It's sad of course. And it's probably not good for society in the short term. But it's hard for me to get too worked up about it; it's not as though they didn't have HUGE advantages versus craigslist. They just didn't take it seriously and it ate their lunch.

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I don't think it was within their power to compete against CL which happily transformed a billion dollar business into a million dollar business. Maybe, just maybe, if the newspapers kept their local monopolies they could have stemmed the bleeding. I tend to think their demise was inevitable - content (news/classifieds) has next to no digital value.

What do you mean news/classifieds have next to no digital value? They're a delivery vehicle for ads, just like TV. They just can't be sold as their own thing. Then again, Craigslist makes a good chunk of its money by charging for classifieds:

https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees

They're not valuable relative to owning a huge printing plant that sits astride the connection between local merchants and local customers.

The local major network affiliate broadcast TV channels still have something resembling the monopoly newspapers had.

Yep. I'm aware of at least one market where a popular local radio/TV media outlet created an online presence before Craigslist got there and still dominates that niche.

I'm also aware of a print shopper with great circulation which had upper management that saw this coming in the mid 90s, and went to their top management with plans to leverage their print business to become a CL and eBay competitor. Upper management shut them down... until about 10 years later (obviously too late).

So you're right. This seems to be pretty self-inflicted. But it doesn't change the fact that these aren't just businesses we're talking about, fungible with any other businesses. They're the businesses we bought our picture of the world from. News organizations having a grassroots revenue stream is a really good way to make sure they're not captured in certain ways.

And they're critically important to keep an eye on government. See, for example, the city administrators in CA paying themselves the better part of $1m/year in cash, plus various vote fraud and open records violations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bell_scandal

Yeah I agree with both of you about the need for investigative journalism. I'm just saying that it's hard to be sad about the papers losing their classified ads. They had a bunch of chances and they screwed them all up.

I think in the long run this'll probably get sorted out. But you are both right that in the short run it sucks.

Personally I'm loving what John Oliver is doing right now; it seems like every week he tackles some kind of genuinely important topic and has such a scathing review of it. They do such a good job that the institution's bad behavior is funny insofar as how misguided it actually is.

It's also depressing that one of the better news sources available right now isn't CNN or some "legacy" media, but rather a guy who came up through The Daily Show.

I think the reason that Last Week Tonight does so well is that they aren't beholden to anyhow. Most legacy media has somehow convinced itself that it needs access to politicians in order to report the news. That has led the reporters to be very deferential to people in power, which prevents them from asking tough questions or for evidence or proof of various assertions by those they quote. And because of that, they've watered down most of the value of their various brands.

It's definitely sad, but I think that in some way these folks did it to themselves. When everyone is reporting "An anonymous government official said Snowden hurt us lots, and he is a bad guy" it's safe to say that they're not really doing their jobs.

> depressing that one of the better news sources available right now isn't CNN or some "legacy" ... the reason that Last Week Tonight does so well is that they aren't beholden to ..

The show runs on HBO, owned by Time Warner, who owns CNN.

I'm not really sure what the point you're trying to make is. That Last Week Tonight really is legacy media because it's owned by the same company that owns CNN? In that case, the Washington Post isn't legacy either, because it's owned by Jeff Bezos who owns Amazon, which is slowly destroying brick-and-mortar stores.

I think what I meant was "Last Week Tonight isn't beholden to politicians" (but I didn't get that out quite right) which affords them the luxury of pointing out how stupid a lot of policies are. They don't need to call $politician up for information or a quote or whatever, so it doesn't matter if $politician doesn't like the show and won't play along.

I think the show will continue for quite a while due to excellent ratings, and those ratings are largely because they're doing the actual work that reporters are supposed to do. I think a lot of legacy newspeople confused what you did in order to do your job with the job itself. In other words, that the ends were the results they were after (having an article, getting on TV, etc) rather than having something important enough that there was no alternative but to write an article or what have you. Getting published was the goal, not having something worth publishing.

One theory for the editorial independence of LWT on HBO is the absence of advertisers who could pull their advertising in response to content. CNN could create an LWT competitor without political guests, but they would remain beholden to CNN advertisers.

An excellent point actually. Similar to the funding model of ordinary people buying papers; there's no one single big sponsor that can get a story shut down.

Last Week tonight is an absolute gem of television, but do note that most of John Oliver's in-depth segments are illustrated by snippets of actual mainstream TV network news coverage of the stories he's talking about.

I know a newspaper who's IT guys very early on brought their major classified section (used cars) online, back in the 90s. It was a very low budget project, but it worked well.

Management pulled the plug on that project (because of course online was not core business and they were afraid it competed with print), only to years later buy a startup to get back in the game...

It's almost like we need an organization created and funded by the people in order to serve their best interests.

Or something.

(in all seriousness though the structure of Reuters is very interesting and designed to prevent capture)

Please expand on/ provide citations for that last thought.

Sorry, should have used past-tense :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomson_Reuters#Purchase_proce...

I'm sure you are talking about KSL ins Salt Lake City.

I don't know if that's what he's referring to, but I will comment that KSL is a pain. It's a bloated error filled site, and I really wish the local communities would stick to CL.

an example of a newspaper that has good online classifieds is KSL, in Salt Lake. Their classifieds are frequently of higher quality than craigslist posts.

> It's sad of course. And it's probably not good for society in the short term. But it's hard for me to get too worked up about it; it's not as though they didn't have HUGE advantages versus craigslist. They just didn't take it seriously and it ate their lunch.

I think we should get worked up about it.

Yes, they deserve to fail, exactly as you said. "They" here is a very small group of people, those running the Post and other papers.

But also as you said, this is probably not good for society - a far, far larger group of people. I would say that this is not just probably not good, but almost certainly not good, barring a miracle.

So yes, it would be just for a small group of people to get their comeuppance. But for all the rest of society, we are losing one of the crucial mechanisms of a functioning democracy. That should terrify us.

It has been/is a fairly flawed mechanism of democracy and is more often used as a propaganda tool than an informative tool.

The larger problem is how do we extract bias from media as I suspect that comes back to money.

> The larger problem is how do we extract bias from media as I suspect that comes back to money.

Maybe with more direct democracy but it has some flaws too.

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