MOLI VIEW™

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!

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