Craig Newmark: The man who invested Craigslist and decimated the Newspaper classified ads industry
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
By:
Tim Gallagher
The man who decimated the business model of the newspaper industry
worked for 17 years as a programmer for IBM in New Jersey. Craig Newmark
had no newspaper experience when he launched Craigslist, which, for all
intents and purposes, destroyed newspaper classified advertising.
In 100 years, when the history—let’s hope it is not an obituary—of
the American newspaper industry is written, the historians will say that
our advantages slid away because we failed to see how the World Wide
Web created a disruptive tool that anyone smart enough could use to
swipe our business. Craig Newmark is Example Number One. His photo will
be at the start of the chapter.
For the record, I have heard Newmark speak and he truly had no
intention of killing our classified business. It was our industry’s
failure to adapt that allowed so much business to vaporize. It is not
the only example. I worked for E.W. Scripps when a mid-level corporate
executive named Ken Lowe (who worked in radio) developed a concept for a
cable television network “about grass growing and paint drying.” It was
called HGTV and it should have been owned by Meredith Corp., which
owned the magazine Better Homes and Gardens. HGTV has become a
mega-hit across the globe, but understand the lesson—a radio guy
invented a cable channel to own a category that had been dominated by a
magazine.
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