The founder of a huge link blog and online community, CraigsList.org, sees the need for a new form of journalism by the online community.

Read the DailyKOS diary on the subject and check out Craigslist.

With millions of visitors, Craigslist might be agreat place to start a national movement toward “open source” freewheeling journalism. Anything would be better than the useless garbage we are fed by TV and Radio. Newspapers tend to be much much better.

Daily Kos :: Craigslist and a New Journalism
In today’s SF Gate there was an interesting article from an AP reporter on Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist) and his interest in developing a new “community” based journalism as an alternative to the MSM. Craigslist has become phenomenally successful with 8 million unique users and more than 2 billion page views per month.

. . .

The article states: “Newmark hopes to develop a pool of “talented amateurs” who could investigate scandals, cover politics and promote the most important and credible stories. Articles would be published on Internet sites ranging from Craigslist to individual Web logs, or blogs.
Craigslist.org gets more than 4 million classified ads and 1 million forums postings each month, and Newmark — who no longer runs it but remains one of three board members — is often blamed for decimating classified advertising revenue at regional newspapers. But he says he has no desire to steal readers from mainstream media.”

“But he believes the reason why newspapers are losing circulation is that too many traditional journalists are willing to quote politicians and business executives even if they’re blatantly lying — merely for the sake of perceived objectivity. He’d prefer an “open source” model of journalism where legions of volunteers act as writers, assignment editors and fact checkers to challenge mainstream journalists.”