> For most newspapers, classified ads long served the same purpose; craigslist and other Internet resources are possibly the leading reason for financial troubles in journalism today.
Well, that's inherent in capitalism: something inefficient (which non-instant, non-searchable classifieds certainly are, compared to CL and friends) gets driven out of the market in favor of the more efficient solution. Generally, this principle works fine from an evolutionary point of view.
The problem is that we as a society have not yet figured out what to do with the losses that originate from the implosion of the "obsolete" infrastructure. With the manual labor replaced by machines in the early industrial history and even with pre-Internet modernizations, societies could shift the labor resources into other jobs that could absorb the load. At the moment, however, there are no labor-intensive "new" jobs available any more for all those whose jobs have been/are/will be replaced by automation, and we do not yet have a concept what to do with societally important stuff such as journalism.
This is a significant factor in current politics, actually - the "flyover states" voted for Trump, and "bloggers" without any journalistic knowledge or even journalistic ethics are a massive counterforce to actual journalists and newspapers... after all, it's easier to spew out fake stuff and nonsense fabricated in minutes than real journalistic articles backed by sometimes thousands of hours of research and work.
The Internet drastically lowered entry barriers (no matter if for journalists, for politicians or for startups), maybe more so than any technological progress before in history... and that has its upsides as well as its downsides.
Well, that's inherent in capitalism: something inefficient (which non-instant, non-searchable classifieds certainly are, compared to CL and friends) gets driven out of the market in favor of the more efficient solution. Generally, this principle works fine from an evolutionary point of view.
The problem is that we as a society have not yet figured out what to do with the losses that originate from the implosion of the "obsolete" infrastructure. With the manual labor replaced by machines in the early industrial history and even with pre-Internet modernizations, societies could shift the labor resources into other jobs that could absorb the load. At the moment, however, there are no labor-intensive "new" jobs available any more for all those whose jobs have been/are/will be replaced by automation, and we do not yet have a concept what to do with societally important stuff such as journalism.
This is a significant factor in current politics, actually - the "flyover states" voted for Trump, and "bloggers" without any journalistic knowledge or even journalistic ethics are a massive counterforce to actual journalists and newspapers... after all, it's easier to spew out fake stuff and nonsense fabricated in minutes than real journalistic articles backed by sometimes thousands of hours of research and work.
The Internet drastically lowered entry barriers (no matter if for journalists, for politicians or for startups), maybe more so than any technological progress before in history... and that has its upsides as well as its downsides.