Journalism Issues

ONLINE MEDIA
Craigslist founder talks about launch online news recommendation project

Craig Newmark has already revolutionised classified advertising in the US with
his hugely successful website, craigslist.com. Now he is planning to shake up
journalism, which he says has "lost the trust" of the public. The founder of
the free classifieds site - the seventh most popular website in the US in terms
of page views - is to launch a major online journalism project within three
months that will copy his "wisdom of the masses" approach to advertising and
apply it to journalism. "Things do need to change," Mr Newmark said. "The big
issue in the US is that newspapers are afraid to talk truth to power. The White
House press corps don't speak the truth to power - they are frightened to lose
access they don't have anyway." ... He said that newspapers, which originally
provided a local service to its readers, had lost their trust. "The American
public has lost a lot of trust in conventional newspaper mechanisms. Mechanisms
are now being developed online to correct that." Mr Newmark would not reveal
any specific projects, which will run separately from Craigslist, but implied
that they would involve using web technology to let readers decide what the
major news stories would be. "We have seen a genuine wisdom-of-crowds effect at
work at times on our website," he said.

Source: Stephen Brook, The Guardian
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,1647681,00.html

// posted by newshare @ 7:07 AM