Bay Blogger Thursday
We've been meaning to interview Craig Newmark for, like, six months -- ever since he dropped by SFist and left his phone number! Everyone here at SFist has used Craigslist for something, and we bet the vast majority of our readers have, too. Hell, SFist Cheshire was in 24 Hours on Craigslist, and when we first met, joked that he found "his car, his house, his job and his fiance on Craigslist." Well, he's got a new job, and his fiance is now his lovely wife, but still -- its not every website that can lay claim to changing someone's life quite so profoundly.
We'd like to note that we tried to audioblog this interview, but had nothing but issues with Blogger.com's audioblogger service (we think it's time we signed up with Eric Rice's Audioblog). So after a few fumbled attempts, we had to take notes the old-fashioned way. So while we wanted this to be our first audio Bay Blogger Thursday (because reading is so last millenium), you're just going to have to read Craig's thoughts on citizen journalism, what motivates the Craigslist team and what Craig uses Craigslist for after the jump. If you want to meet the man in person, he'll be at the Varnish Gallery tomorrow evening, and then moving on to a party at the 12 Galaxies with the cheeseheads from The Onion.
Uncredited photo of Craig with Richard Schiff from Craig's blog.
We asked Craig about the AP article by Rachel Konrad, which he had characterized as "overenthusiastic" to an extent (here are some comments that didn't make it to print). We were curious as to what his real intentions regarding this citizen journalism thing were. "The tools need to evolve. I'm in a cheerleading role right now," he pointed out. "I'm an amateur at this, and I don't want to screw it up...Right now I'm content accelerating the trend."
He had pointed out on his blog that he felt newsrooms were still an indispensible part of journalism, so we asked how he felt that he could help them. "Newsroom jobs are being lost just due to budget cuts," but he hopes that "The faster this [citizen journalism] trend moves the more hiring can go on." "In my head I guess, I'm speaking for everyone. What I want to see is a social trend...Newspapers right now serve a social mission. Some publishers have forgotten that and chase after profits."
So what will be the role of the citizen journalist? "Citizen journalism is going to compliment what we see." That intrigued us, so we asked what SFist and other folks who fancy themselves citizen journalists could do to help, and what he thought newspapers could use help with. "I think we could do with more fact-checking, more follow-up, more investigative journalism...Lots of people individually could help [journalists] figure out what are the best versions of the most important [stories]."
We pointed out that Jeff Jarvis, in his email exchange with Times editor Bill Keller, had suggested that the Times website allow for trackbacks, and that if editors knew what items were being discussed in detail online, it might help them put more resources behind particular stories. "I like that idea a great deal," said Craig.
We changed the subject around to the Craigslist mission (Craig had made it clear that any citizen journalism efforts of his might not necessarily be associated with the Craigslist site). Seeing has he's moved the business side over to CEO Jim Buckmaster to take on customer service, we wanted to know how he dealt with customer service in new, non-english markets. "We don't know how we do it, we kind of make it up as we go along, and it hasn't been too much of an issue so far. So far it's actually worked okay." We asked how they decided on where they chose to expand. "People ask us to expand to new cities...What's the internet usage? What's the population? When Jim, my CEO, has the time and is in the mood, he looks at the list, prioritize, and then adds new cities. We added 15 last week."
Do you consider competition in markets? Have you ever angered someone in a new market? "To my knowledge we've never angered someone. Sometimes people will try to use our site to spam. As far as I know, we've never angered someone, though a spammer might anger people who post on our site."
So we wondered what his motivation for the site was -- money? fame? "Not really, no, I was just helping out. And that's how we view ourselves now." We went off on a tangent about how new technology created entirely new value for the economy, but with Craigslist's free model, this was a lot harder to measure -- so we wanted to know what value Craig felt Craigslist was creating: "The idea is that it's a lot easier for people to go about doing everyday stuff. People are telling us that classifieds are too difficult to use and very expesnive, so we've added value to their lives but the cost is very close to zero."
But some people (we brought up Bill Gates, as Microsoft has in the past accused things like open source software of being anti-competitive because it's free) would argue that by not charging, Craig's hurting the market. "Some believe that. That's a valid value system statement. That's not our value system, not my value system...You keep hearing me reference nerd values. Sometimes it's more satisfying and fun to try to change things a little."
Bringing it back to journalism (and to SFist's desire to start making some real money off this site so we can do this full time), we prodded him for ideas on how to make this all pay. "I'm not sure. I personally fantasize about some things. Frankly, there are some stories that I'm quite interested in, that I might be willing to pay a little for follow up." He brought up an example of an NPR story discussing how the White House had removed the oversight mechanism for spending in Iraq, and that the government has so far 'lost track of' $8.8 billion. But even after a new appropriations bill for $80+ billion was recently passed, "Here's a story that wasn't followed up on, but looks like a really big story."
What about folks who would complain about bloggers selling ads? "The people who complain are a tiny minority. In my experience, people are very reasonable and will give you a break." How about some sort of micropayment system for RSS headlines? "I think that's pretty viable. That's the beginning of the discussion for people who are focusing on this." That's when Craig told us that he was subscribing to the SFist and Gothamist feeds in bloglines.
We wanted to know how he felt about this democritization of media. "This is all so much in flux. I guess what I'm doing is accelerating that in my own little way. I do think we live in a historical period here. There are trends, especially in government, of bad guys who are trying to take control.
"I think the people who voted for the bad guys are good people who have been mislead by the media, but I think that these emerging trends in journalism can help defeat that.
"I think that democritization of media leads to greater democracy in government, because the good people in the world can drown out the manipulators.
"I see on Craigslist, for every bad guy, there's [figuratively] 100,000 good guys."
Craig doesn't consider himself an altruist or an activist, and we get the sense that he really is motivated by "tiny acts of goodwill." While he admits that he has no concrete plans, we feel that he certainly can leverage his role as a public figure and known innovator to help guide and promote the movement towards a more public journalism that works with existing news organizations to create a media economy that's geared towards the social contract of serving the community and not the bottom line of running a business. If those are "nerd values," then they're certainly values that SFist shares, and in fact, wish were common sense.
Oh, and we just had to ask -- no, he doesn't use the personals, though it's because he feels his girlfriend would object. He does, however, use the classifieds. And if you're looking for work, they're hiring webdevs!