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PrintIn August, Chasta Norman was new to San Francisco. Because she didn’t know anyone in the city, she posted a request on Craigslist.org for someone to go walking with her after work.
A merchant mariner named Patrick responded.
“He was really hot,” said Norman, who now lives in Columbia. “I wasn’t looking for what it ended up being at all.”
It ended up being a long-distance relationship, with Patrick moving to Charleston, S.C., and Norman moving to the Midwest. And it started, she said, with Craigslist.
Craigslist, a Web site that provides free classified advertising space and public forums, has been available primarily for mid-size to large cities. But on Sunday, Columbia and about 100 other cities were added to the list.
“We are in a little over 300 cities right now,” said Craig Newmark, founder and chairman of Craigslist, which he created in 1995 in San Francisco. The site also serves more than 50 countries.
In an e-mail, Craigslist President Jim Buckmaster said the recently added cities were chosen primarily based on the number of user requests received for those cities.
When Norman discovered that Craigslist now includes Columbia, she posted an ad for townhouses for Jacobs Realty Property Management, where she does marketing and leasing. She said Craigslist allows people to communicate about a variety of topics.
“It’s a good source for networking as far as jobs are concerned,” she said. “It’s a great medium to meet people.”
Craigslist’s design is simple, void of color or flashing banner ads. A city’s main Craigslist page consists of nine sections: community, personals, discussion forums, housing, for sale, services, jobs, gigs and resumes. Registration and posting are both free. People in Columbia and surrounding areas have posted for-sale ads for cars, slot machines, table lamps and Rascal Flatts tickets, among other things.
According to a Wall Street Journal article published June 17, Craigslist made $25 million in revenue last year. The company draws its profits from a fee it charges users to post job listings in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and brokered apartment rentals in New York.
Free online classified advertising for anyone with Internet access could mean trouble for businesses that turn profits from similar services.
The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, faces competition from sites such as Craigslist.
“Yes, online options have definitely had an impact over the years,” said Patricia Hoyt, director of media and public relations for the Chronicle. She declined to comment further on the type of impact. “We’re a privately held company, and that happens to be one subject that we don’t talk about publicly.”
Clyde Bentley, a journalism professor at MU, said that Craigslist takes citizen journalism, or “user-generated information,” into the realm of advertising.
“It allows people to sell their goods and tell folks about themselves with no fault,” Bentley said. “To compete with Craigslist, newspapers will have to respond to their publics quickly and generously.”
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