Exhibit No. 1 in how Craigslist rules the classified advertising business, courtesy of the Associated Press :

JACKSONVILLE, Ore. - A pair of hoax ads on Craigslist cost an Oregon man much of what he owned. The ads popped up Saturday afternoon, saying the owner of a Jacksonville home was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff’s Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan. But Robert Salisbury had no plans to leave.

It gets worse:

On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater. “I informed them I was the owner, but they refused to give the stuff back,” Salisbury said. “They showed me the Craigslist printout and told me they had the right to do what they did.” The driver sped away after rebuking Salisbury. On his way home he spotted other cars filled with his belongings. Once home he was greeted by close to 30 people rummaging through his barn and front porch.

If the hoaxers had placed the ads in the paper , maybe all this fuss could have been avoided.

(Photo: Reuters / Race horse Chiquitin rolls in sand in paddock during walkabout session ahead of the SIA Cup in Singapore in 2006.)

Monday brings a fresh wave of despair to the newspaper world as sagacious authors in various media outlets let us know that the economy and the neglect of good citizens are threatening the survival of print journalism.

First up is media columnist David Carr in the New York Times, who wrote on Monday about Sam Zell, Brian Tierney and OhSang Kwon, all of whom bought into papers and have found out that the old devils aren’t what they used to be:

The industry may not be touching bottom any time soon. Last year, overall newspaper revenues dropped by about 7 percent, pushed along primarily by the secular change of readers and advertisers fleeing to the Web. And publishing, along with many other kinds of businesses, is now staring at a full-bore recession, led by the credit crisis that is fanning out across the economy.

Staple the secular and cyclical changes together and most newspapers will be staring at double-digit drops in revenue: one analyst I talked to put the figure at 15 percent. It’s clear from their rhetoric and recent moves that highly leveraged players like Mr. Tierney, the partners in Avista and Mr. Zell will have a tough time meeting their obligations.

Over at The New Yorker, Eric Alterman notes that Craigslist is creating a “palpable sense of doom” among newspaper publishers, and hauls out the usual hobgoblins (“prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones,” “the mood these days is funereal,” “Few believe that newspapers in their current form will survive,” “budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs and reductions in page size and column inches,” etc.) as a lengthy lead-in to a story about the Huffington Post and its revolutionary ways of presenting the news. As one of its co-founders says in the story, it’s a “shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.”

There you have it, newspaper publishers, you’re just not as much of a “shared enterprise.” Survival is that simple.

(Photo: Reuters File)