Crossposted at MyLeftWing and
at the orange empire
When I saw the picture of Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com, on the cover, I just had to read the article. I really like craigslist.com; I even used it successfully to buy some furniture several months ago.
What I thought would be an interesting article about how Craig (and the internet in general, including bloggers) is changing the media. What I found was a vile and juvenile screed attacking Craig for, get this, taking money away from newspapers and causing job losses in the newsroom.
Follow me on an exploration of one newspaper’s descent into irrelevance…
The beginning of the article is inauspicious:
Craig Newmark’s stubby fingers tap at the keyboard in an irregular, accelerating rhythm, akin to kernels in a microwave popcorn bag approaching peak heat.
Nice visual there, eh? It gets more pointed rather quickly:
Newmark peers into one of three computer monitors on his home office desk. The screen displays, in plain black-and-white text, the focus of Newmark’s daily life — much of it, anyway. It’s in an e-mail program called Pine, favored by geeks of all ages, partly because it renders the mouse nearly useless. Pine users are, like Newmark, the type who derive an almost perverse pleasure from deleting a message by simply pressing the “D” key, rather than undertaking the laborious task of clicking on a trash can icon. Newmark pores over his inbox, which receives about 300 messages daily.
Not only are Craig’s fingers “stubby”, but he actually uses them efficiently. As anyone who has written software for mission-critical real-time UI’s knows, the mouse is an incredibly slow and inefficient tool for anything that is not intrinsically graphical (like email, duh). Of course, the mouse is absolutely essential for clueless fucktards like our intrepid reporter, who have to be led by the hand through an application, with little tail-wagging puppies making the awful journey bearable.
We have only read the first two paragraphs and already there are indications that the reporter may actually not like Craig very much. These suspicions are verified a bit farther down the page:
The offices of Craigslist, the mostly free classifieds site Newmark co-founded a decade ago, are less than a mile to the west, but he spends most of his workweek here, at the Inner Sunset house his girlfriend teasingly calls his “swank new bachelor pad.” Newmark moved in in October, and his progress does much to reveal his priorities: The wall that will separate the bedroom from the bathroom has yet to be built, but two brand-new, widescreen televisions (one in the living room, one at the foot of the bed) are fully functional.
OMFG, Craig watches TV! I’ll bet he can’t even read!
So why all the disrespect? Especially from a lefty alternative paper like the SF Weekly (I will now begin calling it the SF Weakly, of course :-).
Craig’s great sin is revealed on page 2:
Almost by accident, Newmark built one of the Internet’s most successful sites, creating a free marketplace for millions that continues to grow around the country and the world. Among the unintended consequences of Craigslist’s growth, though, is that it’s sucking away significant dollars in classified advertisements from already-struggling newspapers. Bay Area papers alone forfeit at least $50 million annually to Craigslist, losses that contribute to layoffs of dozens of reporters. As fearful publishers cut newsroom jobs, inferior news coverage is the likely outcome. Craigslist’s devoted fans are unknowingly exchanging one public service for another — trading away the quality of their news for a cheaper way to find an apartment. At the same time, Craigslist’s executives won’t disclose the amount of money they’re pulling in.
Damn, Craig is indeed the heart and soul of pure evil. He (and thousands of other sites on the internet) are providing a better way for people to buy and sell, and is thereby destroying the dead-tree media, who were too clueless to keep up with reality. Another way of putting it might be:
Gee, I’ve waited for this my whole life. I finally got a paying (sort of) job at a real (sort of) newspaper and now, because my paper and I are too clueless to compete in the 21st century, I might lose my job and have to write for free.
I mean, it’s not as if I really know anything. I’m a reporter, I don’t have to (until I stop getting paid for this, that is).
Waaaahhhhh!!!
Of course it’s not only Craig who is ruining this guy’s rush. It’s all citizen journalists, which means, if you post here or anywhere else, you!
You are the enemy. Destroying journalism. Wrecking newspapers.
Cry me a fucking river.
