Craig Newmark: How Being a Geek Made it Hard to Respond to CNN's Ambush

I remember watching the original interview on cnn.com [0] and thinking it looked like the reporter wasn't really interested in getting good answers or giving an accurate story to her viewers, but was just going for a "gotcha".

She seems to have the same strange misunderstanding of large-scale websites that people sometimes voice regarding youtube or google. At one point he asks if she reported an ad she's questioning him about. She says "why do I have the responsibility to report this to you when it's your website? You're the one hosting this online." It's as if she's completely unaware of the scale of the system, and expecting Craig to hand-verify each and every ad.

[0] http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/crime/2010/08/03/cra... - during the last half of the clip

I know I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion by saying this, but the only reason we're upset by this is because we "know and love" Craig Newmark. If CNN did the exact same thing to a BP exec and got the same kind of answers, would anyone be criticizing them? Or would we be too busy falling all over ourselves pointing out what an asshole the executive was? (No, I'm not calling Newmark an asshole)

This was hardly "gotcha" journalism. If Craigslist says they report these kinds of ads but the relevant authorities say they never receive those reports, that's an actual problem, and CNN has every right to report it, and to question the folks in charge. Newmark's trying to say "Aww, shucks, I just do customer service these days", but the reality is it is his site, he is on the board, and if women and minors are getting hurt because CL fails to adequately police the adult ads it charges money for, then Newmark deserves to sweat over it as much as anyone.

I generally love Craigslist, and I generally hate CNN, but sorry, the shoes are on the other feet for this one.

Craigslist has manually screened every adult services post since May 2009. In a blog post last month, they noted: "before being posted each individual ad is reviewed by an attorney licensed to practice law in the US, trained to enforce craigslist’s posting guidelines, which are stricter than those typically used by yellow pages, newspapers, or any other company that we are aware of. More than 700,000 ads were rejected by those attorneys in the year following implementation of manual screening, for falling short of our guidelines."

http://blog.craigslist.org/2010/08/manual-screening-matters/

Craigslist also does other stuff, including phone verification for every adult services ad: http://blog.craigslist.org/2010/05/an-open-invitation-to-rac...

As Craigslist notes, this is a lot more screening than any other services does, including classifieds or the Yellow Pages.

The best advice for dealing with the possibility of being "ambushed", or otherwise being made to answer awkward questions, comes from the British television series "Yes, Prime Minister".

(Prime Minister Hacker speaking to Bernard Woolley, his hapless Principal Private Secretary who has made unwise remarks to the press after being ambushed):

"If you have nothing to say, say nothing. But better, have something to say and say it, no matter what they ask. Pay no attention to the question, make your own statement. If they ask you the same question again, you just say, 'That's not the question' or 'I think the more important question is this:' Then you make another statement of your own."

So his thought out response after the fact was to say the reporter was playing "gotcha"? What a cheap answer.

How about coming out and saying you weren't the right one to speak with BUT you did the research and here are the answers to all of your questions. He can't do that because the underlying report was right in many ways. Crying foul because you're a geek does not resolve the issues in the report.

Im a geek and have trouble with questions in public sometimes too but if you want to follow up because you were caught on the spot then do so with specific answers to the questions answered. Instead we see him crying and giving the same old canned answers.

I don't think it's right how, in his "defense", he crouches behind "borderline Asperger's".

I'm about to briefly rant on it because I think a lot of less rich and less notorious nerds and geeks in my industry make the same, lame, bullcurse excuse whenever they can.

He remarks: "I don’t have a normal person’s ability to sense when someone might be looking to take advantage of these shortcomings."

You know what? I cry BullCurse.

If you watch a tape of the interview, it's pretty clear (at least to me) that he knows damn well - from the start - that he's in a "gotcha" interview. He starts off highly defensive. Eventually she pins him on a question that as a freaking board member of the corporation, and its founder -- he really ought to be able to yet was not prepared to handle. If it were not a privately held firm, the stock would have justifiably fell on his performance. If he depended on being elected to the board - he might be in trouble.

It may very well be the case (and personally, I believe it is) that Craigslist is taking a fairly sane albeit difficult to explain approach to the issues here. I don't think they are an evil hub in that regard.

To cower behind "Oh, it's my borderline Asperger's and the mean lady tricked me...." that gives me some doubt about Craigslist's concern and competence in this area.

Pardon me, but: that was dumb, Craig. Dumb arrogant, not dumb Asperger's.

I'm also not good at spot-on answering questions I haven't considered previously. Luckily, I have thought about most things people want to ask me about. But I've learned stock answers when I get ambushed, even when it's unintentional. "When do you need the answer by?" is one of my favorites. It causes them to prioritize. But the only lesson I had to learn was to have a snap cover answer at hand.

More often than one might expect, the ambush is intentional. They want to appear smart, or to improve their position at the expense of others. To be prepared for anything is impossible. That's why most public figures practice being ambushed, and not freezing. It took me a few times to get the hang of it, but it's well worth it in the politics of corporate life.

Proper response:

Ok reporter lets take a look at your backyard. CNN will blatantly sensationalize and falsify stories just to get ratings. Then turn around and blame the sources when they are caught.

Your the one reporting the story Ms. Reporter, why aren't you verifying? Who here is really profiteering from base human impulses?

To be honest, I have a hard time feeling bad for Craig.

Craigslist made him millions (yes, yes, we all know the story about how he wants to keep CL intentionally small, spurning potential hundreds of millions in profits - but still, he's a millionaire). Part of his money-making strategy is charging prostitutes to post sex ads.

So he can use "I'm a socially inept geek" excuse as long as he wants, I think it's only fair that he is asked some tough questions about it.

Newmark shouldn't beat himself up over failing the trial-by-media-fire. Lyon probably had the story written before she even approached him. Most of us (including former reporters like me) would be no match for a media pro with a particular slant in mind.

  If Amber had done her homework, she would have known 
  ambushing me with questions I am not qualified to answer, 
  or even the right person to ask, would not get CNN’s 
  viewers the accurate information they deserve.

This proves his naivety more than whatever happened in the interview could have. Believing CNN gives a damn about conveying accurate information to its viewers is like believing in Santa Claus.

Journalism is journalism, it's part of democracy. You can't be upset with her for fiercely going after a story that seems plausible.

I don't think Craig/CL are profiteers, but I also don't think they should have that section. It's clearly being abused regardless any original intent.

Their defense that plenty of other sites and magazines/newspapers have the same content doesn't fly with me. Take the higher ground.

I'm not really sure how Craigslist is supposed to stop these ads. I believe they require a credit card, which should only be available to people over 18.

As someone noted, you can't just look at the ad and determine age. And while prostitution is illegal, escorting is not, nor is a massage from a naked lady.

To me it would seem there are two main cases where Craig could report an incident:

1) An ad openly states that the person providing service is under 18.

2) The person in the ad is known to be under 18, e.g., previously arrested.

But short of that, it's not clear to me what Craig could do here. Although, if I were Craig, I'd probably remove the sections altogether. It frankly just doesn't seem to be worth the hassle. I can't believe they make much money from it, and it does cast a slightly dirty tint on the site.

While the reporter's methods were questionable and she was going for a gotcha instead of real dialogue, it does seem that Craigslist's public-messaging about controlling underage prostitution and their real response are 2 different things. They're saying they're on it, but they're not really doing much.

It's difficult to pin the blame on Craigslist since they are simply a medium of communication; prostitution is something that will happen regardless of the communication media available. Before Craigslist, it was newspaper classified ads or Yellow Pages. Before that, it was a certain neighborhood or brothel. Is underage prostitution more common now with digital communication channels available? I don't think so. Look to India or Thailand or the underage trafficking in other parts of the world. It has gone on since well-before anybody heard of Craigslist, the web, or the internet.

The difference is how easy it is to (a) communicate that you are a prostitute and (b) find prostitutes. In other words, as technology has improved, so have the means to quickly find information that you're looking for, whether that information happens to be what the weather is in Cupertino, or which prostitutes are available in your city.

All that being said, it seems that with Craigslist being the source of more and more of the "where are adult services in my neighborhood?" queries in the 21st century, they have responsibility to make sure that underage girls aren't being taken advantage of. How they do that? I'm not sure. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a good solution if your goal (as it seems Craiglist's is) is to facilitate consensual adult sexual connections. If that's your goal, you don't want to turn away prostitutes by actually verifying their age, because that would require ID-based verification of some kind, which I'm guessing most prostitutes wouldn't want to volunteer (fear of law enforcement, etc.) So short of that, what do you do? Image-verification to verify age? That's next to impossible with so much variation among people.

Prostitution is an ugly world. If I were suddenly given the reigns of control at Craigslist, I think I would turn off adult services, even knowing that within very-short-order another site or sites would pop up to fill the gap. I personally wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that even a few people were being exploited because of a communication medium that I created. I guess that's sort of a philosophical debate that needs to be had. Because if you take that to its logical conclusion you shouldn't be able to sleep at night if you created the foundations of the Internet, or the foundations of the Web, or even a communication medium like the telephone. Heck, even going back further, wouldn't that also mean that even creating something like a piece of real estate -- say, a hotel -- is bad because somebody might at some point be exploited at the place you created.

I'll have to give this all some more thought, as I've found myself trapped in a strange place where my logical mind tells me I should have a laissez faire attitude about what I create because people will do bad things with technology and I can't control that, while my "heart" ,for lack of a better word, tells me that if I were in charge of Craigslist I should try to do something. But then I'm back to the, "what should I do?" question. Oh, life.

CNN and WWF share the same building. They deliver about the same amount of truth.

This is why the news industry is dying. Too much bullshit.

The story is: Craigslist says they do X - explain what X is. We verified with Y & Z and they say that have not received any reports/information inline with X. So then they contact craigslist and ask them questions:

1. When did you implement X

2. How is it going?

3. Do you have any metrics/success stories.

4. Who do you contact? (Follow up with them to verify)

5. When we talked to Y & Z they said that they weren't contacted by you can you explain why that is. Since by your own policy X that is what should have been done.

Then I may have learned something. Hell you could even through in some stats so I know how big the problem is -- is it 1 out of 100, 1 out million etc.

Instead you get people posting on the internet interviewing in cars, and ambushing someone who doesn't have time to research anything at all. Perhaps if they ambushed the head of program X they would know the relevant details, but that person might not even exist.

Craig should take some of that $100 million he's made and pay ten guys to follow this lady around doing the same thing.

it is a very disturbing trend - the carriers, be it for example Craigslist or Rackspace are more and more expected (and they actually [self/forced to] obey the expectation to the ever increasing degree) to perform censorship of their users' information flows. Once you cross that line, for all the good intentions, say fighting prostitution or internet phishing/scam, the difference between for example adult services posts, doubtfully looking surveys or political speech is just a mere technicality.

Man, I'm so glad I'm not the Craig of Craigslist, because I when she asked,

"What are you doing to protect these young girls?" I would have probably answered along the lines of,

"Protect her from what, getting $500?"