Four questions with Craig Newmark

If you’re looking for detailed responses to questions, you won’t necessarily find them from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. But his distilled replies reflect more than meets the eye. Newmark, whose business card reads customer service representative and founder of Craigslist, launched what would become the online classified site more than 10 years ago while working for Charles Schwab. Today, Craigslist is available in more than 450 cities and typifies how the Web has transformed publishing.

If Craigslist is not a huge threat to the newspaper industry, what would you consider a larger threat to the industry?

Newmark: Pressure from investors to get large profit margins. Loss of trust due to not enough of the “speak truth to power” community-service mission. Attacks on freedom of the press by the powerful, including successful and routine disinformation attacks.

What steps should newspapers have taken to avoid the losses in classified ad revenues they have suffered, and is it too late for them to recoup some of those losses?

Newmark: I don’t know how to avoid losses in that area, but the study cited in the May 2007 Atlantic (magazine) discusses how to improve profits by increasing quality journalism. (I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, and so I defer to people who really know this stuff.)

Editor’s note: The Atlantic story Newmark refers to is entitled “Pink Slips and Red Ink” and covers a study published in the Journal of Marketing that contends that the more money a publisher invests in its newsroom, the better its business prospects. For more information about the study, go to www.marketingpower.com/content707950.php.

You maintain that newspapers should allocate more funds into investigative journalism. At the same time, many large newspapers are cutting their newsrooms and allocating more resources to civic journalism sites. How can newspapers profitably do both?

Newmark: I don’t understand the contradiction.

How can newspapers make money from their Web sites? Did the industry make a fundamental mistake by commoditizing their value by posting their news online for free?

Newmark: No one’s solved that, beyond considering the usual models, including sponsorship, ads, subscription, etc. I feel the mission of newspapers, as a community service, is to inform people, so I feel that (newspapers) are doing the right thing.