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Laugh Now
Journalists chortled when Craigslist got sued, which doesn't mean they want it to lose. To understand the relationship between Craigslist and the newspapers of America, recall last summer's hit movie War of the Worlds. Think of Craigslist as the army of rampaging tripods and publishers as the screaming humans who don't know what hit them. The tripods don't get any lines, let alone a scene where they and the humans talk things over. But if there were one it might resemble Craigslist founder Craig Newmark's recent appearance at an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference in San Francisco. "I actually have been referred to and prefer to be introduced as the Antichrist of print media," Newmark started off. "But I'd like to assure you that the scariest thing about me is my sense of humor." A transcript of the conference has the audience gamely laughing at Newmark's jokes, as we all tend to do when the jokes are told by someone who threatens to eat us alive. Newmark made it clear he has lots of respect for the civilization he's been leveling. "I do want to remind people," he said, "that I realize how important professional journalism is. The deal is, there's no substitute for someone who can write real well, no substitute for fact-checking, research, and editing. And my half-assed vision of a future -- writers and editors, fact-checkers, will have a more important role in the future. And given my fantasies, and looking at some of the technology coming online now, those are going to be better careers in the near future." Then Newmark cut the crap. "Paper, I have a feeling, as a means of delivering content, may not have a great deal of a future." Craigslist is teaching journalists that virtuous news gathering alone won't save them. That's an old lesson. Back in the 60s and 70s proud city dailies were brought to their knees by suburban throwaways that slapped press releases around supermarket ads. Now Craigslist, the homely but accessible, free national online bulletin board, is threatening to wipe out classified advertising in dailies and alternative weeklies. The first questioner at the conference asked Newmark for mercy. Reminding Newmark that two years ago eBay bought a quarter of Craigslist's stock to make it even more menacing, he wondered, "Why not just take a five-year moratorium on expansion and let the local communities build their own sites, so that the money stays in town and local newspapers can survive? You've got plenty of money, you've got a big operation, you're famous, you're speaking everywhere. Why do you need to keep expanding? Why do you need to move into every damn market in the country and make life more difficult for people there?" "First of all, if you think I'm famous you may need to get out more often." ("Laughter," says the transcript.) "The question you're posing, from my point of view, is, I can help people or I can not help people. You're suggesting that I not help people, and I think that's the answer implicit in that." He said Craigslist was "lucky" eBay joined in the "community service" because "they share a similar moral compass." Craigslist, with a payroll of 19, has made millions by charging for job postings in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Newmark said he would soon start charging apartment brokers in New York but wasn't sure how much, because "we don't want to hurt the smaller agencies, or, let's say, the agents who are new in the business and who aren't being paid very much." A publisher who wasn't moved by Newmark's sensitivity told him, "I hear the stuff about doing good for the little ad agency in New York, and I say, 'Who gives a shit?' Because there's a whole bunch of people in here who are little people as well, Craig. . . . There's a lot of little people here that are going to be affected in very adverse ways through what Craigslist is doing in a benevolent guise." What the little people need, said Newmark, is a new business model. "News is really, really important," he declared, expressing perplexity that newspapers are cutting costs by firing reporters. "That phenomenon has been happening for a long time," he said, "or at least Carl Hiaasen says so in his novels. The deal is that, if we can help everyone get to these cheaper means of delivery quickly enough, then . . . instead of focusing on high profit margins, people can get to journalism again and be a community service." Or whatever. "I need people to tell me if I'm right or if I'm full of shit, basically," he said. "And I'll entertain comments on either side of that spectrum." ("Laughter.") In the end the tripods were halted by neither arms nor treaties. An old-fashioned pathogen did the job, a microbe the natives had been inhaling for centuries. Last month Craigslist was sued in Chicago. The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law accused it of displaying rental ads that violated the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act. Some of the ads cited in the suit are startling. Who knew the law was so persnickety? But long agonewspapers learned to live with it. "Ideal for young person just starting out" was an ad cited for illegally discriminating "on the basis of familial status." Ads that do that -- or discriminate on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, or national origin -- set off alarms at the Lawyers' Committee. Such ads, says the suit, "discourage or prohibit home-seekers from responding to those advertisements and thus decrease the number of units available to them." |
