Matthew Ingram finds another nail in the coffin for newspapers: Facebook is launching classified ads:

It’s clear to me, as it is to Scott, that one of the things that makes Facebook so powerful as a competitor in this particular space is the social aspect it brings. Does anyone feel like they have really connected with someone through their newspaper classifieds? Unlikely. But Facebook and other social networks -- including craigslist -- are more like the bulletin board at the local campus centre, multiplied by a million. That is a powerful force.

What's absolutely killing newspapers is the loss of income from the classifieds. That used to be a gold mine, and it allowed them to become lazy in other areas (see yesterday's post, for instance). Now their private gold mine has been hauled off, and they have absolutely no idea what to do. Their various money-saving schemes range from the stupid to the insane, and then they go and blame Google. As if a search engine that lets me find a news source is a problem.

The upshot of this is, an awful lot of newspapers are going to disappear over the next few years, as team after team of executives fail to understand (and cope with) the problem: witness the Minneapolis Star Tribune, deciding to put a talented columnist on the news beat, for instance. Will they retain Lileks? I seriously doubt it, and that loss is going to hurt them. Smaller (and larger) versions of that are going to be played out in newsrooms across the country, and it will be painful to watch.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, management