Craig Newmark

New York techies and Web aficionados rallied in Washington Square Park today to celebrate ... the Internet! Billed as an "Earth Day for the Internet," OneWebDay is being celebrated around the country (from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco), as communities hold events to learn about and advocate for online participation in democracy. In the Village, Sree Sreenivasan of Columbia's journalism school and WNBC-TV moderated a discussion with Tim Westergren of Pandora, Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig, Craigslist's Craig Newmark, Dharma Dailey of Ethos Group, City Councilwoman Hon. Gale A. Brewer, and others.
Susan Crawford, a professor of law specializing in Internet issues at the University of Michigan, "founded" OneWebDay in 1996.  read more »

It's like 1919 for baseball, or 1929 for the economy. This year is an all-timer for newspapers, so it requires context, revision, and debate. Justin Peters at Columbia Journalism Review is asking a question: is 2008 really the worst year ever for newspapers? (As we argued earlier this week.)

He's got some other candidates. Like!

1963: The production staffers for New York’s daily newspapers waged a 114-day strike, which shut down all of the city’s dailies, cost nearly $200 million and put the New York Mirror out of business. "There was inconvenience for the readers and the merchants lost money—but there was nothing like fear; and that was because citizens, by radio if by no other means, could still discern the broad outline of what was going on," wrote Carl Lindstrom in 1964’s The Fading American Newspaper.

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The second of Arianna Huffington’s New York parties for her subtly titled book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe, published by Knopf, took place at the Upper East Side store of Italian designer Domenico Vacca on the evening of Monday, June 23. (The first was on May 9 at the Chambers Hotel, co-hosted by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and former Viacom CEO Tom Freston.)

Ms. Huffington, who was dressed in a tan pantsuit and an off-white silk blouse designed by Mr. Vacca, said she met the designer one year ago at a Tribeca Film Festival dinner, where she was introduced to him by friend and TFF president, Jennifer Maguire Isham.  read more »

He says so himself in a Q-and-A about the Internets in this month's Vanity Fair:

I really did grow up as a nerd. In high school I really did have thick black glasses taped together. I really did wear a plastic pocket protector. This is not an exaggeration. And I felt left out all the time. Nowadays, I remember that feeling, and I want everyone to be included, and that’s something we work on every day on the site.

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"I'm a guy who may or may not exist. I want to assure all your readers that I don't exist. I'll add, as a bonus joke for all the physics nerds, I exist in a state of quantum superposition, simultaneously existing and nonexisting." - Craig Newmark, quoted in A Guy Named Craig, by Philip Weiss, New York, January 16, 2006. "[T]the young man in the wig and sunglasses, it turns out, is not a man at all. The public role of JT Leroy is played by Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop's half sister, who is in her mid-20's." - The Unmasking of JT Leroy: In Public, He's a She, by Warren St. John, The New York Times, January 9, 2006. —Matt Haber  read more »