A little more than a decade ago, when I lived in San Francisco, I used
to spend quite a bit of time hanging out in a coffee shop in Cole
Valley. (Hey, it was the nineties.) I often ran into a guy from the
neighborhood who had the look and demeanor of George Costanza – short,
balding, underemployed and full of complaints about the effect this had
on his ability to attract women. Sometimes he would tell me about an
online project he was working on to keep track of parties, especially
the kind with open bars funded by Internet start-ups.

Today
that same guy is keeping hundreds, if not thousands, of the country's
writers in coffee shops – because they're unemployed. It's partly his
fault. Incidentally, he's probably the biggest pimp in the U.S.

By now you've probably guessed that I'm talking about Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. And I should say that I like the site. I've used it myself.

Newmark's
great innovation was to provide advertising without content, then wrap
it all in a dubious notion of community. Traditionally, advertising has
supported journalism. Classified advertising especially, has supported
U.S. newspapers. But Craigslist provides free advertising in most
sections; it charges for Real Estate and help-wanted ads. And the money
it does earn doesn't support journalism. It mostly serves to support
the emission of that uniquely Bay Area pollutant that a "South Park"
episode termed "smug."

In a recent interview,
Newmark promoted the idea that newspapers should "speak truth to power"
and mentioned the important of investigative reporting. But his
business is partly responsible for the layoffs that are making that
impossible. Tellingly, he says about that reporting that "No one knows
how that will be paid for." Well, advertising worked until you screwed
that up!

What makes Newmark truly insufferable is the way he stays on message
about serving the Craigslist community. (Only in modern San Francisco
can a group of people trading furniture and sex
be called a community.) This reminds me of nothing so much as the way
Wal-Mart executives talk about how they're keeping prices low to serve
their customers. Certainly, both are right: Newmark has done a lot for
Craigslist readers, just has Wal-Mart has done a lot for its customers.
At the same time, however, Newmark has helped destroy the kind of
journalism he claims to want, and Wal-Mart has effectively shipped
thousands of jobs to China.

Newmark has made much of his donations to "citizen journalism"
projects. So far, however, none of them have led to much reporting –
much less the kind of investigative reporting Newmark says the country
needs more of.

Now that the idea of free classified
advertising is out there, it's not going to go away. If Newmark hadn't
succeeded with the concept, someone else would have. And maybe it's not
such a bad thing after all. But I sure wish Newmark would shut up about
journalism already.