“There are bigger things that have been more problematic for newspapers,” he added, including circulation losses and basic mismanagement. “Newspapers have an enormous amount of debt. That is not something that can be laid at our doorstep.”
Clayton Frink is the publisher of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, where Craigslist arrived in 2005. The newspaper last month stopped printing daily, adopting a Web strategy and printing weekly. “They have ads we would have had once upon a time,” Frink said, but added that his staff did not consider it “No. 1 or No. 2 or 3 of websites that hurt our business.” The bigger enemy, he said, is the changing market place, noting that large employers used to buy a page-and-a-half for job listings and “now they put in a small ad saying to see their website.”
“What Craigslist does well is build a community and a feel of a community,” Frink said. “Building communities is going to be critical for any online product, whether a newspaper or not.”
Also, Craigslist no longer sneaks up on local newspapers. Sammy Lopez, publisher of The Daily Times in Farmington, said: “We’ve been kind of watching them. You can get on Craigslist and see if people have been requesting a site. I asked someone to look at that four or five months ago, and saw that they had.” He said the knowledge that Craigslist would be arriving someday led the paper to improve its online presentation of classified ads. He noted that a vibrant classified ad section was both a revenue source and a reason that people buy the paper and visit the website.
Newmark is a believer in the power of technology to improve life—whether in the blogging he does for Obama, a visit he recently made to Israel where he argued in favour of micro-loans and technological innovation to build up the Palestinian economy, or the use of online tools to make government more transparent. He promotes these projects on his personal blog.
The list of good government and good journalism websites Newmark is involved with—sometimes financially, but more often as adviser and advocate in the Silicon Valley world—speak for themselves: factcheck.org, sunlightfoundation.com, PRWatch.org, NewsTrust.net, publicintegrity.org.
An article in The Observer of London two years ago described him as “readying his armoury of cash to invest in citizen journalism projects”. Newmark says he never donated more than $20,000 to any organization.
But he has not followed the common path to Silicon Valley philanthropy—create a successful website, sell the website either to a larger company or through an initial public offering, acquire a pile of cash, then give away part of that.
While unwilling to discuss his wealth, he said he could be a lot richer if he wanted to be. “We know these guys in Google and the eBay guys,” he said, “and they are not any happier than anyone else. A lot of money is a burden.”
©2008/The New York Times