this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Politics
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Journalism has been utter hell as a place to make a living for the past 20 years. Online platforms broke the local oligopolies on commercial speech and classifieds, and left that money in the hands of a few newly-minted billionaires instead of journalists. I don't see that as the result of the Biden administration or their policies.
By 2003, most newsrooms were already owned by chains. Readers didn't know this, as I found out when I took over as news ed in a small town after a corporate acquisition. Pitchforks galore (and on a long enough timeline, their fears were founded in that it was functionally subsumed by the already-owned larger nearby sister paper), but we'd been sold by fucking CapCities, not some local eccentric publisher/owner/gadfly.
And the journalists never got the big bucks.
Craigslist was encroaching on smaller and smaller markets. We're pre-Facebook here, so there's still plenty of time to abandon classifieds as a sunk cost and right the ship, but instead of using the diversity of markets and demographics to foster an era of experimentation in delivery methods and pricing, we pretty much got "we tried nothing, and it's not working" as the excuse to accelerate consolidation.
Gannett's finally catching up to Sinclair in brazenness such that we can all see the endgame, but the end of local control was going to mean a similar result regardless of where the Web taking off ended up falling on the timeline.
Good reporting carries risks for shareholders, especially those of the institutional variety.
CL had also gone to garbage, with realtors and auto dealerships and crappy service industries posting crappy jobs. I’m hoping classifieds will come back.