Also Esquire invites you to hack their e-ink technology.

A good quote from the article:

“They’re one of the very few companies in the world that could raise its prices with impunity,” says Peter Zollman, founding principal of Classified Intelligence. He says Craigslist is a for-profit business “run like a nonprofit.”

But Newmark says users – the constituency he’s most loyal to – don’t care about Craigslist making more money. “There’s nothing noble or altruistic or pious about what we’re doing,” he says. “Once you make enough money and provide for your future, it’s more satisfying to change the world a little bit.”

And cashing out by selling the company is out of the question. “Jim and I know some of these really rich guys,” he says. “They’re not happier than anyone we know. So what’s the point?”

On the journalism front:

Craigslist is often characterized as an assassin of newspapers, spiriting away their classified advertising revenues. …

“Has Craigslist caused newspapers pain? Yes. It’s called capitalism,” Zollman says. “They came along with a better mousetrap, and people started using it.”

Newmark is personally interested in exploring the potential for the Internet to support new kinds of journalism, whether produced by professional investigative reporters or amateurs. “We need investigative reporters to ask tough questions,” he says.

Among the organizations he supplies with moral or financial support are the Sunlight Foundation, which aims to improve access to congressional information; NewAssignment.net, which promotes “open source” reporting; and ProPublica, which is building a team of investigative journalists.

The state of the American news media in 2008 is more troubled than a year ago.

Here are highlights from the introduction (I will have more over the next couple of days):

• Even with so many new sources, more people now consume what old media newsrooms produce, particularly from print, than before. Online, for instance, the top 10 news Web sites, drawing mostly from old brands, are more of an oligarchy, commanding a larger share of audience, than in the legacy media. The verdict on citizen media for now suggests limitations. And research shows blogs and public affairs Web sites attract a smaller audience than expected and are produced by people with even more elite backgrounds than journalists. 
• …it appears the biggest problem facing traditional media has less to do with where people get information than how to pay for it — the emerging reality that advertising isn’t migrating online with the consumer. The crisis in journalism, in other words, may not strictly be loss of audience. It may, more fundamentally, be the decoupling of news and advertising.
• …their basic challenge: somehow they must reinvent their profession and their business model at the same time they are cutting back on their reporting and resources.

Here is an AP Story about the report, a Wired story,  a CNet News.com story and a PC World blog.

Of course, this reaffirms that our Representative Journalism trial at Locally Grown in Northfield, Minnesota is indeed extremely important.  

 Beneath the somber tales of shrinking revenues and staff cuts is an even more somber reality about the news business: The nearly two-century-old marriage between consumer advertising and journalism is on the rocks.

I don’t want to scoop myself, but watch these pages over the next few days. I have been saying the above for a while and have been touting Representative Journalism. Now it is time to stop the talk and walk the walk. More soon.