One Man's Bug Is Another Man's Feature

Rod Dreher has a semi-thoughtful piece about why many people have decided that newspapers are worthless. He provides several plausible explanations of what may be contributing factors to the demise of the Newsrag Industrial Complex.

But what struck me was this part:

What I'm thinking about this morning is what happened at my place yesterday. Julie decided she wanted to get rid of a particular piece of furniture we had. She put an ad on Craigslist Dallas. Within minutes, she'd sold the thing. When the purchaser who bought it showed up later to pick it up, we talked about the virtues of Craigslist. I told her that the problem with Craigslist was that it meant people didn't have to buy classified ads anymore -- which really hurt my industry.

"You work for the newspaper?" she said. "Um, we don't subscribe. Sorry! I miss the ritual of reading the morning paper with my coffee, but given that you can get the same information online, my husband and I figured that was one expense we just couldn't afford anymore."

She was clearly an educated woman, and was embarrassed to admit what she'd just admitted. But it is what it is.

So what was Craig Newmark supposed to do when he got the idea for Craigslist? I suppose he could have said to himself, "Gee, I could create a really efficient service that would help people buy and sell things and save them hard-earned dollars. But that would mean news execs would have to smoke cheaper cigars. So ix-nay on the ist-lay."

Presenting Craigslist as a "problem" which is "embarrassing to admit" that you use seems to indicate an extremely one-sided way to look at the world. The only reason the newspaper corporations have become enormously successful is by providing products and services to people which are in demand. In a sense, they created the model of selling subscribers to other corporations by way of advertising, the internet companies just perfected it. They had all these big "annuities" rolling in for years because they were the only game in town, not because their copy was so great.

This post is partially in response to people who often question why many of the readers here and I have "picked on" Rod Dreher so much. But this seems to be a reverse of the argument against Wal-mart, i.e., Wal-mart is seen coming in to the small village flexing is gigantic muscles and putting the little business owners out in the street or running hair salons and Kung Fu schools. Newmark describes his website as a "happy accident" and yet the insinuation here is that he is playing Wal-mart against the "little guys" represented by all these huge media corporations? It just doesn't make sense. Newmark says in that interview that he turned down venture funding many times; everything about Craigslist cries out "Small is beautiful". Can that be said of the big media corporations which consume forests to deliver a Sunday paper which is so full of advertising that an old granny can barely lift it?

I can see the point of the anti-Wal-mart fanatics and their ilk about how they "unfairly" leverage economies of scale. But if anything, getting beaten by Craigslist just highlights the stupidity of Old Media which should have jumped into the internet full force in the mid-nineties. It also maybe helps break the capitalism-only-helps-the-fat-cats narrative, and presents a "problem" for those who cling to that canard.

And the odds that Rod's wife will stop using Craiglist are about the same as the odds that my wife will stop using Craigslist. Extrapolating from her use of Craigslist they'll probably be putting Wal-mart out of business at some point.
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