Don't Blame Craig for Killing Newspapers

Soon after he finished sitting for an interview with journalist Doug McGray last night, Craig Newmark was back hard at work doing what he says he does best — handling customer service for his company, Craigslist.

I know this because he was answering my emails pretty much as quickly as it would have taken him to drive from the interview at Ft. Mason on the Bay to his home here in San Francisco. The purpose behind our contact was my desire to address all of those critics who claim that Craigslist is somehow to blame for killing the newspaper business. A number of said critics were on a panel with me a week ago discussing how to cope with the impending collapse of the San Francisco Chronicle, that is, if the Hearst Corporation is to be believed.

It is worth examining the evolution of Craigslist from a tiny local email list to its current iteration as a global behemoth operating in more than 500 urban areas, generating over 20 billion page views a month. In his interview with McGray, Newmark said that he started out simply trying to create a kind of online “flea market,” sort of like the kind his Mom enjoyed when he was growing up back in New Jersey.

He pointed out that flea markets, like malls, are about a lot more than sales; they also are about socializing. It hit me when I heard him say that that Craigslist is really the original social networking site in our online media world. As Craig says, “We learned to…turn over the running of the site to the people who use it.”

What a simple, yet profound concept! And yet one so at odds with the traditional operating model of a newspaper, where the reader/user had no control whatsoever over the content, and often felt ignored, angry, alienated as a result  — particularly after said newspaper got something that mattered to him or her wrong.

During the past 14 years (Craig launched late in 1995), newspapers have ever so gradually come to recognize the error of their ways, though even today some insiders fail to acknowledge these basic flaws in their relationship with the community whose support they so desperately need if they are to sustain themselves.

(I should note here that the key executive running the old San Francisco Examiner, and more recently the Chronicle, in San Francisco, over the past 14 years is not among those who point the finger at Craig for destroying his industry. Phil Bronstein told me today: “I certainly don’t ‘blame’ Craig for creating something very successful and innovative because it also had the effect of contributing to major declines in newspaper classifieds. I consider Craig a friend…and know that the unemployment of good journalists and the disappearance of newspaper newsrooms concerns him.)   

Craig is a very political guy, someone who cares passionately about the state of our democracy, and for that matter, as Phil Bronstein noted, our news media. Craig points out that we are still evolving into a “large-scale networked, grassroots democracy” where “everyone’s voice is a part of things.”

In this context, he identifies our responsibility as citizens as including “voting up the good stuff and voting down the bad,” much as has long been the case at slashdot.org. As we continued our email conversation this morning, I asked Craig about how much influence the original online community here in the Bay Area had on the origin of his service.

“The WELL was very influential, in the attitude of the community and in demonstrating the positive ways people interacted online,” he answered. So, there you have it — a direct link back to the counter-culture of the Sixties, Stuart Brand, The Whole Earth Catalogue. You might call it one vast left-wing conspiracy except that none of this is about ideology at all, or for that matter, about technology.

It’s about connecting with others, simply the most radical thing any person can do.