Craigslist and journalism

Posted by Martin Stabe on 20 February 2006 at 14:18
Tags: Guardian, Newspapers, Observer, Online

Last week, Press Gazette revealed Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s concerns about the threat Newmark poses to newspapers with his Craigslist websites, which are now becoming established in some UK cities.

In yesterday’s Observer, we learned that:

[Craig] Newmark believes he is a part of a visionary movement, slaying the old media. He sees a world where newspapers and reporters are defunct, replaced by an online army of ‘citizen journalists’ beholden to no proprietor or political party and writing the news on the web.

Really? That’s not what he’s been saying in public.

Newmark certainly has little time for some aspects of contemporary journalism. But he has also said he wants to further traditional journalism, particularly investigative journalism. The online news project he is reportedly investing in is a company run by Upendra Shardanand and Jeff Jarvis dedicated to “technologies that promise to help people find the most trusted versions of the more important stories“.

Information Week last week examined what little is known about this project. In their interview hardly sounds like an evangelist for citizen journalism:

Newmark said that citizen journalism is evolving and that it contains good and bad. Political scammers promoting fraud represent one of the biggest problems with citizen journalism, he said. Wikipedia recently experienced what Newmark describes as “centralized disinformation campaigns.”“That will be ended because there are far more trustworthy people than bad,” he said, citing Slashdot as a current example of successful moderating.

In another recent interview, he said:

… One of the tenets of the effort I’m involved with is to drive more traffic to professional news sites. People have gotten too excited about citizen journalism, and they’re not addressing the balance well.

Nor is Newmark is a professional-journalism-nihilist. In the same interview, he said “there’s no substitute for professional-level writing and fact-checking and editing”.

Oh, the irony.

Surely the only kind of journalism that is defunct is the kind that makes claims about people without interviews or at least trawling the recent cuttings.