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by coredog64 2323 days ago
Nitpick: Plenty of people gripe about CL. By giving away classified ads, CL killed a huge cash cow for many newspapers.
1 comments

This is a direct corollary of the existence of the internet and the effect that had on the scarcity of information that supported the local newspaper model. Ben Thompson has written a number of great articles diving into this topic at Stratechery[1]. I understand why blaming CL seems like it should be a thing, but it's absolutely the wrong target: the very existence of the internet made newspapers utterly unsustainable because the scarcity they depended on vanished.

[1] https://stratechery.com/