NEW TIMES is evil. Their pages have virtually no content and a bunch of ads – if it wasn’t for their event listings no one would read at all.

The market rewards efficiency – I can’t wait to see all the hate mail next week.

The newspaper industry has been in trouble for a long time and entirely too conglomerated and entirely too concerned with profits over good reporting.

My one beef with craigslist is that landlords save money on apartments they rent and real estate agents make money off the houses they sell but do not necessarily pass those savings along the to renter or buyer. Real estate agents will always tell you advertising is their largest expense thus justifying the larger percentages they keep.

The market rewards efficiency.

I don’t think it was a smear article, and Craig Newmark doesn’t either. I’m disappointed that you would write so personally about me, someone that you’ve never actually spoken with, and ask me questions in a blog post without giving me a chance to respond, but I thought it was worth replying to address some of the points you make.

I didn’t paint Craig as a “sinister ‘geek.’” I merely described him as a geek—which he is. Having taken many computer science courses in college, and lived in the Bay Area for several years, many of my friends are geeks. It’s not a disparaging term—Newmark calls himself a nerd or geek as a point of pride. I didn’t say that his two TVs and a lack of bathroom were a bad thing. I just described them to elucidate who he is and what matters to him.

I didn’t describe newspapers as “unwitting victims of the sinister Newmark” or as “little defenseless girls,” as you charge. The newspaper industry has many serious problems to address, Craigslist or no Craigslist, and I made that clear in the article. But there’s no question that the site is having a significant effect on newspaper revenues.

That my management, with which I and the other staff writers have very little contact, didn’t see this coming is hardly grounds for calling me “incompetant” (your misspelling, not mine). As it stands, if you want to be a journalist and earn a salary, you have to work for a media company. Most media companies happened to miss the boat on the Internet.

In the future, I hope you will think twice before posting personal attacks on your blog. Someone might actually be reading…

Best regards,
Ryan Blitstein