In a fit of irony, I had never heard of this, and nobody I told this to had ever heard it either. This article is about polarization, but it's also about the decline of the news industry, the same industry that didn't do such a good job spreading this particular story over the past several years.
How the rise of Craigslist helped fuel America's political polarization
Aug 2025, phys.org
Craigslist launched in San Francisco in 1995, and over time effectively killed off the humble newspaper classified ad, which in the year 2000, made 30% of their revenues.Craigslist rolled out in an idiosyncratic city-by-city expansion. This staggered spread created what is known in economics as a natural experiment.
This needs some explanation, so I'm copying most of it:
Looking at more than 1,500 newspapers, the researchers could compare what happened before and after Craigslist arrived, isolating its effects from other factors like the rapid expansion of broadband internet.Newspaper executives axed a lot of the expensive, "prestige" political coverage that classifieds had subsidized, because it wasn't something readers flocked to, and it cost more to produce than sports or entertainment.Following the entry of Craigslist in a market, newspapers reduced mentions of politicians competing in local congressional races by an average of 12%. The missing coverage also led to declines in circulation, particularly among readers interested in general news, who tended to be more educated, wealthier, and more politically engaged."When they're less informed and they're less likely to get solid information, they tend to go to extremes, because they don't have the information that the extreme candidates are extreme."Readers who didn't follow politics closely were also affected. "You may not have been reading the newspaper because you wanted to learn about politics, but the stories about politics were bundled together with the things that you did care about."When local political coverage disappeared, along with it went an important way for many voters to spot the differences between candidates, particularly unknown candidates running in party primaries. In a world of perfect information, extreme candidates would usually lose, because their stances are by definition far from the average voter's. When voters have less information available to ferret out political positions that do not align with their views, they cast more votes for extreme candidates."The reduction in staff covering politics made it harder for voters to differentiate between moderates and extremists in partisan primaries, and allowed extreme candidates to do better than they did before." This, in turn, fueled political polarization.
[And I guess this is why the City University of New York announced in 2024 a $10 million gift from Craig Newmark for a tuition-free Graduate School of Journalism.]
via Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Cornell and Ruben National University of Singapore: Milena Djourelova et al, The Impact of Online Competition on Local Newspapers: Evidence from the Introduction of Craigslist, Review of Economic Studies (2024). DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdae049
Image credit: AI Art - A Crowd From View - 2025
Post Script
I'll record here only for personal posterity's sake, a line of reasoning that follows from this - does this mean that advertising (in the form of classifieds) is necessary for democracy? I know Ben Franklin's newspaper in Philadelphia was funded by advertisers. Is it supposed to be government-funded? Sounds like someone needs to take a political science course.
Post Post Script
This makes the social media problem circa the 2020's even more sinister, since these platforms, some of which are also the largest companies in the world, they're not only taking the advertising dollars from traditional media, but they're also incentivizing the opposite of information (in the form of dis- and mis-information). I mean they don't even employ journalists, nevermind the fact that they propagate on their networks non-news (as in, fake news from fake news outlets created with names to sound similar to reputable news outlets).
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