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Starting Sunday, craigslist will charge $25 for placing job ads on the website in Los Angeles and New York. The cheapskates who want models, actors and artists to work for free will be moved to a new category called "gigs." Craig explains:
We believe that charging a modest fee will help separate "the wheat from the chaff", and ensure that these job boards remain viable as a place for full-time jobs from quality employers. That has certainly been the experience in the SF Bay Area, where job ads were originally free, but have cost $75 since September, 2000. The extra revenue would help ensure that craigslist can continue to fulfill its mission of public service on an ever-growing scale.
Hat tip to LAVoice.org for getting there first. Meanwhile, I respectfully add a kernel of info to a thread showing up on other L.A. blogs. Art.blogging.la reported Wednesday that the Times has switched CalendarLive to free access. It was picked up at blogging.la, and some readers posted they were still being asked to login with a password. Nonetheless, this afternoon LAist joined in and pronounced that the entertainment and features side of the Times website "is a fee-based service no longer." If it were true, that would be good news indeed, and an admission by the Times that the Web doesn't value the paper's soft content as much as they think. But it seemed unlikely that the Tribune would abandon such a pillar of its online strategy without braying. So I emailed Elaine Zinngrabe, general manager of TimesInteractive, for an explanation of the blog reports. Her response:
It's not true.
When I tried just now to call up a CalendarLive story, the usual intercepter screen came up: "The content you requested is reserved for calendarlive.com members only. Membership is FREE for Los Angeles Times 7-day newspaper subscribers." Or you can pay $4.95 for a month of access. A 14-day free trial is available.
BTW, in Googling to see if there was any online news about a change in LAT policy, I found this interview with Lynda Keeler of LA.com in Editor & Publisher from earlier this month. And since I've gone this far, I may as well mention the other Los Angeles-centric blogs: Defamer peers under Paris Hilton's skirt, and L.A. Blogs is doing nifty daily blog round ups.