A recent study has examined how the rise of Craigslist and the decline of newspaper classified ads contributed to changes in political coverage and increased polarization in the United States.
Before Craigslist’s launch in 1995, newspapers relied heavily on revenue from classified advertising. At the turn of the millennium, classifieds made up about 30% of newspaper revenues. The spread of Craigslist, which now operates in over 400 U.S. locations, significantly reduced this source of income for local papers.
Gregory Martin, associate professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, along with Milena Djourelova from Cornell University and Ruben Durante from the National University of Singapore, analyzed more than 1,500 newspapers to understand these effects. Their research took advantage of Craigslist’s staggered city-by-city expansion to compare markets before and after its arrival.
The researchers found that when Craigslist entered a market, newspapers responded by cutting costs—primarily by reducing staff covering local politics rather than sports or entertainment. “We showed that sports and entertainment writers were more or less unaffected, while the local politics desk was cut first in response to the shock,” Martin says. “I didn’t really anticipate that the effects would be so concentrated in political reporting.”
This reduction led to fewer mentions of politicians competing in congressional races—by an average of 12%—and similar declines for other levels of government. Coverage dropped most sharply before primary elections.
Martin notes that readers did not immediately notice these changes because many did not subscribe specifically for classifieds: “They weren’t subscribing in order to look for used cars.” However, as political coverage shrank, circulation declined among readers who valued general news—the group most likely to vote and be politically engaged.
“The group of readers who reduced their newspaper reading the most after Craigslist entered their city were those who read the most,” Martin says. He adds that people who are frequent newspaper readers also tend to vote more often: “So 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.”
Even casual readers were affected because political stories had been bundled with other topics: “For most people, consuming political media is not something that they do by choice,” Martin says. “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.”
With less coverage available on local politics and candidates’ positions harder for voters to discern, support for more extreme candidates increased. As Martin explains: “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.”
In areas where Craigslist disrupted local newsrooms, there was a documented decrease in bipartisan voting patterns and an increase both in extreme candidates running for office and their electoral success.
While Craigslist alone may not have caused all print newspapers’ struggles—it coincided with broader shifts such as online display advertising through platforms like Google and Facebook—it played a significant role in shrinking newsroom resources dedicated to political reporting. According to Martin: “It took some time after that for readers to recognize that the paper was getting thinner… Getting rid of this huge source of revenue that was subsidizing all of the investments in reporting made the product worse.”
“This story was originally published by Stanford Graduate School of Business.”
