At least someone’s making lemonade

I always find something strange and disturbing about articles breathlessly declaring how good a terrible situation is for some tiny segment of the population. We heard tales a few months ago of the brilliance of Goldman Sachs, making a bet that the economy would tank and then profiting to the tune of $4 billion from the financial crisis that grips the country. It was actually considered exciting and positive news that Sachs were making so much money and few bothered to take the moment to consider that perhaps it wasn’t so positive that the only way to make money was betting on the failure of the economy.

The effects of a massive economic shock can be quite interesting as it sends ripples causing enormous losses for many but also unexpected profits for some. One winner, we learned today, is the newspaper business.

Newspapers have been seeing drops in their readership and even the NY Times has offered buy outs to its employees to cut costs. The transition to online media is not an easy one for organizations as large and set in their ways as the old media and though there has been success transitioning to the web many papers are sure not to survive.

For now there is good news though. The sort of good news that’s built on a giant pile of extremely bad news. Newspapers are seeing their profits rise due to a significant increase in the number of classified ads they are running.

All decade, newspaper execs have complained that Craigslist is killing their classifieds. The 2008 report of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says Craigslist has “gobbled share in general classified and is a presence in real estate….”One question: Have these analysts picked up a classifieds section lately? If they did, they’d come upon the shocking revelation that the housing sector is, in fact, shoring up newspaper classifieds.

The collapsed housing sector, that is.

Foreclosure notices are filling in where condo sales and auto deals once held sway. “There are definitely more than we’ve ever seen,” says Ginger Stanley, executive director of the Virginia Press Association. “I’ve been in the business 30 years.”

Breathless excitement over temporary trends caused by disastrous occurrences are par for the course these days it seems. Of course for all the tales of Wall Street profits and losses and of winners in the midst of this mess, we are missing the voice of the families who have lost their homes. They are only represented in our papers by the flood of foreclosure notices.