A Guy Named Craig (craigslist changes what?)

In the past few months, I and countless others in the mainstream media have awakened to the fact that something we thought was benign and even modestly beneficial, if we happened to have a room to rent or something to sell, was in fact a wild beast, loose in the orchards. Craigslist.org is changing everything. A simple and free online classified-ad service started by the gnomish Craig Newmark in San Francisco eleven years ago, Craigslist is (a) where young urban people conduct much of the traffic of their lives, including renting apartments, finding lost pets, and getting laid in the middle of the day, and is (b) thereby destroying classified revenues for big-city newspapers, which are already in crisis, and so it has become (c) the symbol of the transformation of the information industry. Rocked in a Bay Area cradle of left-wing values, Craigslist has built a huge national community by word of mouth. The site is free and without advertising (with the exception of help-wanted ads in three markets), and it gets more than 3 billion page views per month (10 million actual users a month), ranking it seventh on the Net, not so far behind Google and eBay.

Craigslist's largest category is New York apartments, where it posts more than half a million listings a month. Yes, half a million (many of these repeats).

Buckmaster's face wrenches in suppressed feeling when he states that there were 40 workstations set up at the Superdome in New Orleans for 20,000 people. Working thousands of miles away, Craigslist sought to shorten the lines in the Astrodome by changing its listing format, so that its page of 100 listings by headline would appear as 100 digested listings, including contact info, so that printouts could be passed around and dozens of offers considered at once. When the Red Cross balked at handling offers of help on Craigslist, on liability grounds, Buckmaster didn't even bother to call the agency.

"We saw the comments in the press, and it caused me in my mind to group the Red Cross with fema as a backward bureaucracy that is getting long in the tooth and possibly not up to the problem at hand," he says. "It's a very naïve reaction, and a five- or ten-year-old fear: We can't trust something off the Internet."

in England, Newmark spoke openly about the stealth media venture he has invested in to promote citizen journalism.

The power of the Net could be used, he said, to help sort out trustworthy from untrustworthy reporters, and promote stories that were important but not getting attention from the mainstream media, in which people were losing trust anyway. The epicenter of this erosion, Newmark told me when I spoke with him just before the conference, is the White House press room, which let us down over Iraq. "We need the corps to back up Helen [Thomas, the columnist, who opposed the invasion from the start]."

Newmark's remarks were perceived as a "slam" at the mainstream media, and he was soon backtracking. We need trained journalists and editors and fact-checkers, he said. We need big newsrooms.

"I'm just trying to make newsrooms stronger," he said when I saw him in December.