Internet entrepreneur to take on traditional journalism

The American internet entrepreneur who has single-handedly siphoned tens of millions of advertising dollars from newspapers in the United States by creating a wildly popular online alternative for classified listings warned this week that he intends to launch a similar challenge to the relevance of traditional journalism.

Serving notice to trained reporters everywhere to watch their backs is the thoroughly estimable Craig Newmark, who established himself as a pioneer of the cyber-era ten years ago when he launched craigslist.org, in volume terms now the seventh-most visited internet site in America just after eBay.

No-one dare not listen to Mr Newmark, 52, because of the social phenomenon craigslist.org has become.

With the pizzazz of a boiled potato - there are no graphics or pictures - the site offers users a mostly free venue to place and respond to classified ads of all imaginable kinds.

Looking for a piano, a puppy pug, quick anonymous sex, riding lessons or tickets to Elton John? Craigslist will help you.

Mr Newmark, who helps run the site with just 18 other employees from a small office in San Francisco, balks at the suggestion that he is deliberately sabotaging the newspaper industry in the US and beyond.

(Today, there are editions of the site for almost every major US city and in cities in 35 other countries.) Yet, the evidence is there.

In the San Francisco area alone, it is reckoned he has denied local newspapers about $50 million in classified advertising revenue annually.

The site makes only a modest income, charging only for recruitment ads in the biggest markets like New York.

Everything else is free.

At a seminar at the Said Business School at Oxford University this week, Mr Newmark rehearsed his new media paradigm: the combination of improving Web technology and a popular groundswell of distrust of reporters - especially, he says, because of ill-informed reporting of the Iraq War and its build-up - means that ordinary people are ready to take over the newsroom.

Mr Newmark said that he expects to launch his own project in the coming weeks that will harness the "wisdom of the masses" that has fuelled his advertising site and apply it to daily journalism.

While withholding specifics, he is hinting at an interactive website on which users could both decide which parts of the news really matter to them and even report some of it themselves.

"Things need to change," he said.

"The big issue in the US is that newspapers are afraid to talk truth to power.

The White House press corps don't speak the truth to power - they are frightened to lose access they don't have anyway."Some observers expect Mr Newmark shortly to make a bid for the site wikipedia.com, an encyclopedia site that explicitly invites users to contribute with their own definitions and descriptions.

Mr Newmark may have it in mind to transform the site into a huge cyber-based community news forum.

"I do think professional and citizen journalism will blur together," he predicts, "because we will find that some amateurs are as talented as a professional journalist." The performance of the White House press corps seems to enrage him especially.

He singles out the veteran Helen Thomas as the only reporter in Washington doing an honourable job.

"No one is taking their job seriously there," he recently remarked.

"Now it could be that they could be under a directive to not do so.

We don't know.

I've spoken to a lot of journalists who are very frustrated." Part of the problem lies with the newspapers themselves.

The race for dollars, he insists, has obscured the race for truth.

"They're being run as profit centres, and they're trying to get pretty high profit margins.

As a result, investigative reporting has been seen as a problem."

- INDEPENDENT