I think you missed something in your wonderful statment Mithridate as I started laughing at the way this sentence was written in the paper:

Foremost, a decent newspaper is the enemy of rumor and a citizen of its place.

IF you look at that sentence it reads that the Op Ed was stating that the SEATTLE TIMES IS THE ENEMY OF RUMOR AND ENEMY OF THE CITIZEN.

I realize they are trying to state that the paper is a person too for some strange reason, but it can be quite Freudian especially since the Seattle Times is wacko as they come.

One can always bet their last dollar that if the Seattle Times was making money or gaining circulation from Craig's List and the list was causing the destruction of America......the ST would be in favor of Craig's List.

America is past Dinosaur Media..........we have entered the eon of Fossil Media. The Seattle Times is the bone pile of media.

*HIC IACET ARTORIVS REX QVONDAM REXQVE FVTVRVS

I once about 40 years ago had an old (he was in his 70's and still activily publishing) local newspaper reporter tell me "these new durn editors and owners we have now think the advertisements next to the funny pages are more important than the news content" he then took a couple of draws on his pipe while we fishing together and he said "I told the guy then why don't you save the paper waste for all the rest of the paper and just try to sell the advertizement section only"

At that time the paper made a profit even without any ad revenue because people read it for the quality reporting.

It sure doesn't work like that today.

On the one hand, we have Reality. On the other hand, we have beliefs about reality. Since the earliest philosophers, we’ve noticed that some of our beliefs about reality turned out wrong. Philosophers don’t know every cause of this yet, but we know a few. The most common cause is to allow your emotions to cloud your vision. You see what you want to see, not what’s before you. To prevent some of these wrong beliefs, we’ve learned to test them. When we submit our beliefs to a testing process, we think we’ve cut out the distortions our desires can cause. Usually we do, but testing isn’t perfect.

Funny thing about proof, however. All proofs (mathematical, scientific, logical, whatever) have the same basic structure. You inevitably take something you suspect (your hypothesis) and compare it to something you trust. But ay, there’s the rub. What do you trust? And why do you trust it? We could push this argument into deep philosophy (Rorty, Quine, Wittgenstein) but we don’t have to. We only have to ask reporters how they test their beliefs. What do they trust, and how do they compare their hypotheses to what they trust? Good reporters … and there are some out there … test their beliefs fairly. But as this website demonstrates, not all of them do. They test their beliefs only against other beliefs that are equally partisan and ideological.

Journalists fancy themselves as superior because they submit their beliefs to a process. But process is not enough. We need to test the process itself for biases and prejudices. These guys just won’t examine themselves. They feel that their editors and journalistic training are enough to prove their stories. Therefore, if their training agrees and their editors publish their stories, to them, that’s self-evident proof that the stories have no bias. They won’t admit, or even consider, that the media they use to test themselves is itself decidedly liberal.

The sea looks tilted to slanted sailors on slanted ships.

"...(Craigslist) claims the profits normally shifted to the newsroom."

Isn't this like saying:

"Toyota claims the profits normally shifted to GM"?

Perhaps whiny boy here needs a lesson in basic capitalism!

You're producing junk, Skippy. People are not buying. Alternatives like Craigslist are more attractive.

This 'entitlement' mentality is astonishing!

Newspapers really do deserve a long, slow, lingering death.