Craig Newmark: Craigslist Offers a 'Culture of Trust'
Newspapers could retain readers by adding blogs, says the founder of the community site Craigslist
By Laura Pennace
Photo/Gene Hwang
The name Craig Newmark may not be familiar to many people, but his Web site Craigslist is known by almost every young adult with a computer.
That’s because Craigslist is a virtual smorgasbord of online offerings—thousands of listings organized by city and category. If you want to find a date in Chicago, you can do that as easily as finding a job in Houston, or an apartment share in Atlanta.
Newmark, Craigslist’s founder, began the site 10 years ago to help form an online community and share news of local events with people living in the San Francisco area. The site quickly grew in popularity, and local versions launched in dozens of other cities in America and abroad. Today every continent has at least one Craigslist, and more cities are frequently added.
Craigslist, remarkably, established its worldwide presence mostly through word of mouth. And while the site was established as a technical for-profit organization in 1999, according to Newmark less than 5 percent of Craigslist charges a fee. Only job ads in its leading markets of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles require payments of $25 to $75 for posting. All other postings remain free.
“I’d like to see a Helen Thomas blog; we’d get some real reporting out of the White House.”
Newmark says he spends much of his time on customer service for the site. He also works with the Craigslist Foundation, a nonprofit he started to help other nonprofits find success.
While Craigslist’s popularity is increasing, Newmark does not perceive his site as a threat to newspapers, as some in the industry contend. “We may be vaporizing many ads that would be placed in newspapers, but there is a lot of potential classified business that remains untapped,” he claims.
Many young people are turning to Craigslist because “fewer and fewer people trust the mainstream press,” he says, citing news bias and a lack of coverage of some stories by major newspapers. “There is a culture of trust on the site. We are simple, effective, honest.”
While admitting that many blogs are not professionally produced, he sees blogs as “a new type of publishing” and predicts that “amateur journalism and professional journalism will blend together.”
He also sees blogs as potentially valuable to newspapers. “Reporters could really report the news that otherwise gets unreported,” he says. “I’d like to see a Helen Thomas blog; we’d get some real reporting out of the White House.”
If done well, newspaper blogs would improve news quality, customer retention and trust, he says.