Craigslist founder Craig Newmark thinks there's many reasons besides his creation why U.S. newspapers are facing troubles these days -- even though it pulls in US$80 million to $100 million annually with just 25 employees.
The Web sites’ expansion comes as newspapers are experiencing a steep downturn in classified advertising, magnified by the badly depressed housing market and weaker overall economy. Print classified advertising declined 16 percent last year, to $14.2 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America, below the 1996 level, even without adjusting for inflation.
In this straitened market, Craigslist becomes shorthand for the threat that online advertising outlets are seen as posing to newspapers.
Mr. Buckmaster responds, saying that Craigslist has no sales force and has not sought to win over newspaper advertisers, in contrast to companies like the job-listing site Monster. “That to me is a direct attack on newspapers,” he said. “We put a service out there.”
“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, Wis., where Craigslist arrived in 2005. The newspaper late last month stopped printing daily, adopting a Web strategy and printing weekly.
“They have ads we would have had once upon a time,” he said, but added that his staff did not consider it “No. 1 or No. 2 or 3 of Web sites that hurt our business.” The bigger enemy, he said, is the changing marketplace, 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 Web site.”
“What Craigslist does well is build a community and a feel of a community,” he 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, creating more categories and clear entry points. He noted that a vibrant classified-ad section was both a revenue source and a reason that people buy the paper and visit the Web site.
Mr. Newmark is a believer in the power of technology to improve life — whether in the blogging he does for Mr. Obama, a visit he recently made to Israel where he argued in favor of microloans 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. As of the last couple of weeks, he has been writing posts on Twitter.com, too.
The list of good-government and good-journalism Web sites Mr. 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 armory of cash to invest in citizen journalism projects.” Mr. 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 Web site, sell the Web site 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. “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.”