It’s more than a little ironic that Craig “Craigslist.org” Newmark — the guy whose classified service is making $50-million or so a year more or less by accident, and eating the lunch of various metropolian newspapers in the process — is a big fan of journalism and of newspapers. I’ve come across many comments by him that express his respect for the craft, and the latest is an account of his talk at the WeMedia conference in Miami that Jemima Kiss (god, I love that name) posted on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog.
The way Jemima describes it, Craig talked about how political philosophers and thinkers Thomas Paine and John Locke were very much like bloggers (except their blogs were written on parchment), and that they caused their own “paradigm shift” in the media. Craig said there is also a place for traditional media skills such as editing and information filtering — something that doesn’t get talked about a lot in these days of “open source” journalism and participatory media. Craig says:
“Everyday I see what some call the wisdom of crowds, but the down side to that is that there can be mob rule, or panic, or low-quality information so what you need on top of that is another layer – the editors.”
Craig went on to say that the blogging model is exciting but it “generally means speaking the truth and checking later,” Jemima says, while professional journalists do the fact-checking first. In many ways, Newmark said, newspapers may have been the precursor to the Internet. Interesting idea, that. The rest of Jemima’s roundup is also worth reading.