Blogger Follows: Craig Calls Out the "Urban Myth" that He Hurt Newspapers

(MoneyWatch)  One of keys to Twitter's success is its propensity for letting its users improve on the basic product. Founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have often spoken out about this, noting that popular features like hash tags and reTweets were not their ideas, but instead emerged from the community that has accrued around the service.

Another one of those features is Follow Friday, when people recommend others to follow on the micro-blogging platform.

In that spirit, I think bloggers should also cull through and recommend other blogs from time to time, especially less-traveled ones that you might have missed (unless you are also keeping a non-stop watch on the media industry).

Two that grabbed my attention today involved, first, Craigslist and whether it is a cause of the newspaper industry's decline; and second, the prospects for magazines and newspapers going forward, given the historic switchover in advertising placements from print to online and mobile platforms that is well underway.

The first story comes via Ava Seave, posting at Audience Development for Folio about Craig Newmark's visit to the Harvard Business School Club this week. "It's an urban legend that Craigslist affected the news business badly," she quotes Craig as saying. (Seave seems to disagree with him, BTW.)

She also reports another piece of news -- that the classified service will be rolling out a type of OpenID system in 2010. "We need a better balance between anonymity and accountability," she quotes Newmark as saying.

The second story that caught my eye was the position advanced at an advertising conference by Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, as reported by Hoag Levins at AdAge, that he "not only thinks the contraction of the newspaper and magazine industry will continue, but that it needs to continue."

According to Levins, Sorrell "cited the over-capacity of supply and inventory as a major problem holding back the re-stabilization of the media business. He also predicted that ad agencies would be getting 'very much more involved' in the development of content and that the lines between advertising and editorial are going to get 'much more blurred' than they already are today."

Taken together, these short blog pots today neatly bookmark what is wrong about two points of accepted wisdom in the traditional media today:

1. How things got this way. (Read the related posts below.)
2. Why they won't get better soon.

So, there you have today's contribution for a kind of Follow Blogger Friday...

Related Bnet Media Links:
When Craigslist Won the War Over Classified Ads
Don't Blame Craig for Killing Newspapers