In recent days with the arrest of the “Craigslist Killer,” craigslist.org has been demonized in the media. Is this demonizing to the extent that it is occurring justified or is this the establishment media lashing out in desperation at one of the lead contributors to its downfall?

In the recent issue of the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review, Steven Ross argues that the recession has killed newspapers, not Craigslist or the outdated business model of newspapers.

However, the statistics he uses to support his claim are rather skewed. He looks at nationwide classified ad revenue for newspapers from 1994 to 2007. These numbers show a increase in classified ad revenue from $12.5 billion to $14.2 billion. However Craigslist did not expand beyond San Francisco until 2000. So if you look at classified ad revenue nationwide from 2000 to 2008 it plummets from $19.6 billion to $9.9 billion. (These statistics are according to The Newspaper Association of America, the chart can be found here.)

The old print newspaper model relied on four main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand purchases, ad sales and classified sales. Since papers such as the New York Times decided to post their newspaper for free online subscriptions and newsstand sales have plummeted. Ad revenue online can only support approximately 10% of the organization at its peak. And as long as Craigslist exists, classified revenue is never coming back to the news industry.

Craigslist while they are a for profit corporation, are seemingly content with a relatively small profit margin. They have only 28 employees. Their only revenue streams are $25 per job ad in 17 cities and $75 in San Francisco. They also charge for brokered apartment listings in New York City, this idea came from their customers as a way to do away with repeat posts and spam.

Today I did a simple Google News search for the term “craigslist.” Not only did the search return 100’s of articles on the “Craigslist Killer,” but on the first page of the search were these headlines: “Craigslist buyer attacked with hammer”; “50 arrested in Craigslist sex sting”; Craigslist scam targets Ky. Real estate”…it goes on and on from there.

So a reader my read these headlines and think, “Wow, I guess craigslist is a scary place infested with scary people.” Granted the person would be very gullible and void of common sense, but I digress.

Craigslist receives over 20 billion page view a day, which makes it the seventh most trafficked site in the English language on the entire internet. One in ten Americans uses Craigslist every month. When a site gets that large headlines like those I listed above no longer are a reflection on Craigslist as much as they are a reflection on society as a whole. And society as a whole is always going to have a few bad apples.

So the fact that the media is calling for Craigslist to protect people from themselves is in itself irresponsible. It doesn’t take a genius to see the arch of these attacks on Craigslist, the mainstream media would love to see one of two things happen. Either have laws put in place that would regulate Craigslist into being a site that is less user friendly, or successfully brand Craigslist as a place where seedy prostitutes and their customers do business, or if you buys something off of craigslist you might just get attacked with a hammer.

As the member of the pirate bay team said last week in a video message on their site, “You can’t put laws into place against social behavior, you should make the laws to suite behavior.” I think essentially what he means by this is the old establishment needs to stop fighting these things and figure out a way to exist inside of them. Because the train has already long since left the station.

The fact is that neither one of these things is ever going to happen. Craigslist has millions and millions of customers on its side that have never had a bad experience and that is the sole reason it will continue uninhibited into the foreseeable future.

Now let’s take a step back and realize why this story is important in the grand scheme of media. What these attacks on craigslist truly signal is the collapse of the newspaper industry collapsing on a broad scale. The tremors have already begun, but next will come the implosion. This will lead to extremely fractured, specialized media mostly on the web. And I think eventually these fractured media outlets will converge into the new wave of digital media conglomerates.