Classified

By Mark Choate
Orig. Posted to Online-News

There is a fundamental economic law at work here: more competition means lower profits. Less competition means higher profits. For many years, newspapers operated in what economists would call an environment of monopolistic competition. Monopolistic competition is defined as a market in which there are only a few providers of a particular good or service, and these providers offer highly differentiated versions of these products. This contrasts with pure competition, in which there are numerous providers of a good or service, all of whom offer more or less the very same thing. Like corn farmers, for example. If you have a lot of competitors all of whom offer the very same product or service as you do, then you are working in an industry that has been commoditized. Corn is a commodity. So are classified ads.

Heh. The beauty of this is that it was created and submitted without being initiated by Al Jordan (who runs ElwoodIndiana.org) or myself. It's cheesy, but funny. You can be sure we're going to try to make this 'garage sale' and get lots of pictures. ;)

We got a police scanner for our office (oh yeah, we have an office sort of now... more on that later ;), and I was looking up Indiana Code to see what the law said about us having it. The only way to carry it in a car is to get permission from the local police chief (what happens if we cover multiple counties??) or be a 'newspaper.' Here's Indiana's definition of a newspaper. It seems you have to have a printed publication.

I won't say out loud here who's responsible, but here's the link. If you're too lazy to click (it is a pain, isn't it?), or if someone realized their error and fixed it, here's a sanitized version (names removed and their euphemisms parenthesized to protect the guilty):

Adrian Holovaty mentioned over at E-Media Tidbits something interesting. Seems Anil Dash has responded to a column by Tim Redmond comparing Craigslist to Wal-Mart. Heh.