Craig Killed the News

Rewind to 1993 in San Francisco, California. Craig Newmark was a Case Western Reserve computer science graduate working at IBM for nearly 17 years and moved on to work at several contract jobs until introduced to the world wide web by a coworker at Charles Schwab. Craig was fascinated with the internet and he was anxious to build something online. Soon, Craig launched a mailing list that morphed into Craigslist.org.

In 1995, Craigslist became a portal to the dot-com scene that connected buyers and sellers; it was the first exponential online marketplace. Soon thereafter, Craigslist became the largest classified advertisements listing in the world.

Printed newspapers at the time were making money from a variety of revenue sources — user subscriptions, single edition sales, advertising, and paid classifieds. These newspapers generated a powerful cash flow that could fund an expensive team of diligent, uncompromised journalists and investigative reporters. Teams of objective Ivy League writers, well worth their money, were an esteemed group that wrote for an audience of millions of readers. The peak of journalistic influence provided readers with fact-checked, timely, objective investigative reporting. News had never been more reliable and accountable.

Soon, Craigslist found a few areas where people were willing to pay and started to charge a nominal…