Craig Alexander Newmark (born December 6, 1952) is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.
People everywhere have the same needs and values. They need a place to live and a job. Beyond that, they may need to sell stuff or get a mate.
A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.
We don't think of ourselves as do-gooders or altruists. It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing.
I don't expect to be a ‘leader’ with this thing. I'd rather be a builder. I'd like to build a way for people doing good work to connect, to learn from each other, protect each other, and then I want to get out of their way.
From the very beginning, I was involved in talking to people, listening to people. And it hasn't stopped. The idea was that people send me information; I'd ask them about it, listen, try to do something about it - and then ask for more feedback.
What works on the net works for people in general. The net has very little to do with technology, what matters is how people use the technology.
My understanding from talking to a lot of people in the business has been that it used to be that a newspaper was considered a community service. Now they're being run as profit centers, and they're trying to get pretty high profit margins. As a result, investigative reporting has been seen as a problem.
The stuff that works best is driven by passion rather than dollars.
Milestones aren't what I think about much.
I want you to know, at this very moment, I am simulating normal human behavior.
We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.
We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that trust.
Getting out of the way is really important.
In business, there are times when you disagree, and sometimes it turns out that you're just plain wrong. Humor takes away tension and helps you realize you're wrong.
A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.
I want to help accelerate the evolution of the press because right now, newsrooms are cutting investigative journalists, and we need investigative journalists.
I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, because I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like programming. You know, what else do we need?
Okay, I'm not in the news business, and I'm not going to tell anyone how to do their job. However, it'd be good to have news reporting that I could trust again, and there's evidence that fact-checking is an idea whose time has come.
Sometimes a slow gradual approach does more good than a large gesture.
I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort.