It’s not only his day job that is drawing attention to Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.
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The eBay lawsuit against his company is generating a lot of heat. But friends and foes are also beginning to take note of Newmark’s extracurricular activities, including his involvement in politics and journalism.
He has given the maximum donation to Barack Obama’s presidential primary campaign, and voices his support of the candidate on his personal blog. He’s an advisory board member of OneVoice, an international group working to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He is also a director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters use of technology to better inform voters. The foundation has funded web sites such as the Center for Responsive Politics and Congresspedia.
Along with the New York Times and new media blogger Jeff Jarvis, Newmark is an investor in Daylife, a site that gathers content from across the web, then aggregates it on subject-oriented pages.
He also sits on the advisory board of the Center for Citizen Media, which fosters grassroots journalism. The nonprofit center was begun by Dan Gillmor, a former reporter with the San Jose Mercury News and the Detroit Free Press.
Mainstream news media types might consider Newmark’s experiments in nontraditional journalism yet another aggravation from a guy who blazed the trail for free online classifieds. Newspaper execs blame Craiglist for diverting their own revenue streams from advertising for jobs and real estate.
Craigslist does charge for some advertising in major cities. The consulting firm Classified Intelligence recently projected that income from such ads would total more than $80 million this year. Craigslist revenues have been steadily climbing as newspaper classified revenues have dropped.
Craigslist covers more than 300 U.S. cities, and provides listings in 55 countries. The site claims more than 10 billion page views per month - traffic that many online newspapers would die for.
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