I’m going to say it: Craigslist.

Am I fired? Whispering that two-syllable bugaboo can get you in a lot of hot water at many newspapers today, because Craigslist is “killing newspapers” by drying up the former newspaper cash cow of classified advertising.

Cry me a river.

Newspapers, you refused to give users what they wanted. You put no effort into your product, and you gave users an inferior product. You begged and pleaded for someone to come along and create a service like Craigslist.

And so Craig Newmark did, and it made millions of people very happy — except newspaper publishers who were far too slow to react (this seems to be a recurring theme). Newspapers resisted putting classifieds on their Web sites for years. Once they did, they put up non-standard, non-searchable abbreviations for words, which made the listings virtually useless.

Looking for a two-bedroom apartment with a fireplace? Well, you might find a “charming 2br apt with fpl,” or a “cozie 2bed apartment with a fp.” The people who took down classified advertising for the print edition used non-standard abbreviations, because there only goal was get all the words to fit. That’s fine for print, but terrible for online.

There are no space limitations for a Web site. Abbreviations don’t make sense, but newspapers never took the time to convert those abbreviations to real words. This made all of these listings unsearchable, and if something isn’t searchable on the Web, it is completely useless.

Enter Craigslist. It’s a searchable, database driven classified advertising Web site. It does everything that newspapers should have done, and it was founded precisely because there was a huge void in the market. It was not created to make money, but rather because there was nothing like it out there and people wanted a service like that.

Craigslist doesn’t even charge money to list an advertisement, nor does it have ads on the site. The site’s soul source of money comes from paid job ads in select markets and paid broker apartment ads in New York. Craigslist deserved to win over newspapers because it is a better product.

It was the only product that had users in mind. If newspapers cared about their Web users, Craigslist would have never been launched in 1999, which was long after Internet usage exploded in this country.

Fast forward to Dec. 19, 2007, and newspapers are still blaming Craigslist for their own institutional failings. One reader contacted me to tell me how Craigslist was removed from the lede of his story, because he was told he is not allowed to even mention Craigslist in writing.

Because, you know, Craigslist is the devil. What makes this even more egregious is that Craigslist was integral to his story — that’s why he mentioned the site. And now this young reporter finds himself in hot water with his very upset editor for making such a big faux pas.

He told me this experience makes him feel like his paper is “soft” and “that’s its journalism mission is compromised.” But this isn’t unique to him or his paper, because I hear this all the time from readers about their small and mid-sized daily newspapers. Honestly, where is the journalism these days?

There isn’t much journalism left and many younger journalists are leaving because of the appalling state of affairs of the industry. This episode shows the overwhelming hubris that many papers have blinded themselves with: “It’s only true if we print it!” and “People won’t find out about it if we don’t mention it!”

Right…

“This is why I’m hesitant to work for a paper again,” said another young reader about the Craigslist episode. “They are so screwed up.”

But we all know what is ailing most newspapers these days. “The business side is driving our editorial content,” the reporter who mentioned Craigslist told me.

Now, that’s serving readers.