Day Three recap from Wendy M. Grossman.
“Do you feel guilty about killing newspapers?” Saul Hansell asked Craig Newmark yesterday. The founder of Craig’s List, widely credited with stealing newspapers’ classified ads, offered the mildly presented answer that it would be more correct to say that Craig’s List, Amazon, and eBay took the newspapers’ audience by offering them a more friendly and convenient marketplace.
At some point in the early 19-00s, Charlotte-Anne Lucas explained today, newspapers changed from charging for content to charging for audiences, leading them to selecting content based on its mass appeal. Exactly, she didn’t say, like AOL in the mid 1990s, when it switched from making its money from connect time, which favored all sorts of niche content, to making its money from advertising, which required mass eyeballs.