Craigslist has wrecked havoc on newspaper classified business in the US over the last five years. What started as a small San Francisco email among friends has grown into a giant killer by making online classifieds free. (Craigslist is yet to make an impact in Australia even though it has coverage in the capital cities.) Now, this report from Editor & Publisher reports that Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, is close to launching “a major online journalism project within the next few months that will copy the successful ‘wisdom of the masses’ approach to classified advertising and apply it to journalism”.
Citizen journalism is developing well in the US and Europe. Craig Newmark entering this and allied spaces would dramatically lift the profile and bring traffic.
In the E&P interview Newmark makes comments about journalists which the folks at Fairfax might find interesting given their editorial redundancies.