I feel the same way. The headline should say:

Technical progress and competition have cost U.S. newspapers $5 billion since 2000, researchers say

If you consider how much value craigslist creates, its so much more than $5B. Everyone who wasn't willing to pay for a newspaper ad plus the people that were add up to a lot of benefit. Its a ton of value. It doesn't go into GDP. But its still real value.

This is how I was looking at it..

And saved people countless hours in waiting for their classifieds to get printed and effort in figuring out spacing and setting up their ads.