Why Are Newspapers Buying Up Communities?

There’s an interesting thought piece by Bjorn Jeffries in Sweden who reacts to local newspapers’ moves to buy up web based communities. He argues that newspapers, having got stung by the loss of classified sales to Craigslist and Blocket.se, are wrongly scrambling to buy the next big thing:

Youth communites differ from online classifieds in one crucial aspect – the classifieds took money from the newspapers. These communities don’t, and can’t. They are aimed for a demographic that the newspapers never really had anyway. So worrying about making a new Blocket-mistake isn’t really relevant.

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