Craig Newmark's interview with The Washington Post

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark met with reporters and editors from The Washington Post yesterday and talked about all kinds of interesting things, including the presidential election.

But of course, the newspaper's interviewers couldn't resist addressing the elephant in the room: how does he feel about Craigslist's impact on newspaper Classified ad revenues? While it wasn't specifically mentioned, I imagine some of the people in that room were thinking about longtime friends who have recently left the Post through buyouts.

Here's a clip from that part of the interview:

Newmark's response was interesting, and I think pretty accurate. He says that these problems are not the fault of Craigslist specifically, but rather larger trends of which Craigslist is a part. He pointed to niche sites focusing on narrow Classified verticals, and the fact that investors of publicly traded newspaper companies insist on ongoing profit margins of 10-30%.

He predicted that more newspapers would work together in networks, and that philanthropic models like ProPublica (and I would add that in the future, hopefully also David Cohn's community-funded Spot.us) would continue the professional practice of journalism. And lest you demonize Newmark, he did make a point that newspapers are still leaders in fact checking and professional judgment, which implies that he thinks these qualities are less present at the "amateur" level.

In my opinion, throwing up your hands and assuming that journalism-by-handout is the only way to ensure the practice of journalism is a worse-case scenario. There's a place for it, but is it the only choice? No. We still have time to fix this problem.

The truth is that the ad-supported media models that worked before the digital era are no longer guaranteed to work in the same way because the information environment is fundamentally different. That doesn't mean that new models are not possible. At The Bakersfield Californian we're going to try some new approaches with Printcasting, and we're floating a lot of other little boats in the water.

The real message here is that any business that focuses on delivering information needs to constantly think outside the box about how to monetize that activity. That's what Craig Newmark did. For many years he charged nothing for what turned out to be a superior way for people to meet, connect, buy and sell. He only started charging for a few services later as a way to pay the bills. If Craigslist disappeared tomorrow, another similar service would replace it in a heartbeat.

So much innovation at newspapers has focused on serving the audience, which is important since that's where everything begins. But we have seen little to no true innnovation around business models. I'm not really a "revenue guy" so I can't explain why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the psychology of sales. Salespeople are compensated based on how much they sell, and when the sales environment sours to high sales they follow the money. Often that means they pick up and find an environment where the money is still flowing.

The thing that's most on my mind these days is this. How do we foster a culture of risk and innovation in sales?