Thinkcorps

SF Weekly has published a hilarious smear of Craigslist, blaming him for the lost jobs of Bay Area reporters. Writer Ryan Blitstein has spent way too much time crafting his colorful turns of phrase to really understand, well, really anything.

Poor Ryan laments the downfall of the venerated newspaper, while repeating the sloppy reporting techniques and blatant sensationalism that got newspapers into trouble in the first place.

It’s difficult to read an article with facts as twisted as this without smiling. As an old acquaintance once said (actually the market researcher father of a college girlfriend), “Statistics are like a woman in a bikini. What they reveal is interesting, what they hide is crucial.”

First, Blitstein paints Craig as a sinister “geek”, who’s month-and-half-old apartment doesn’t have a finished bathroom, but does have 2 operational, wall-mounted flat-screen TVs.

Well, yeah, those are the same. Ryan, have you ever set up a stereo before? Have you ever remodeled a bathroom before? How are these two activities equivalent?

Then, he paints newspapers as unwitting victims of the sinister Newmark, who’s craigslist classifieds site has apparently sucked the oxygen out of every newsroom within a hundred miles.

Explain to me again how newspaper publishing companies are like defenseless little girls? Explain how the decline in local coverage, decreases in circulation, and a serious lack of “new media” smarts is not the fault of newspaper management?

Business is about change. Hell, life is about change. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t need reporters. That is your job, after all, Mr. Reporter. You report stories about how things are changing.

The very fact that you and your management didn’t see this coming proves that you’re incompetant and don’t deserve your place in the community, our loyalty, or your jobs. It’s harsh, but true.

The upside, of course, is that we all are still here. We all still need to know what’s going on, and we need to connect to our local communities perhaps more than ever. We are still thirsty for the connection newspapers offered long ago and the Internet offers now.

You still have a chance to redeem yourself.

But hey, if you want to sit and whine about your plight, that’s cool too. I don’t have to wait for you to build a community, I can go out and do it myself—just like Craig.

I recently got a comment from the author of an article that I panned in what the author considered a personal attack. To be honest, I can see his point. I write off the cuff most of the time, and there’s some frustration and hidden baggage I bring along to my posts, I think. That’s blogging, isn’t it? It can be a diary or it can be a newspaper, and it’s searchable and findable, so you can easily put it on the same stage as, say, The New York Times. Which of course, it isn’t. Just because you found my blog and you read it, doesn’t mean that it’s a public platform. I don’t answer to a community of readers, I answer to me.

So should I temper my writing since it can be considered ‘public’? Or should readers understand that this is a window … into my soul! :>