Tech billionaire Craig Newmark boosted his commitment to strengthening the news media with a $20 million gift to create an endowment at the City University of New York’s graduate journalism program.
Like Craigslist, the internet service Newmark started in 1995 that provides free classified advertising, the graduate journalism school will now bear his name.
Newmark has poured money into journalism research, training, and direct support of news gathering since the 2016 elections. He says “bad actors” have pushed disinformation and sought to discredit the media, pushing the country into a high-stakes “information war.”
His latest donation — and putting his name on an up-and-coming journalism school — is a way of planting his flag on the issue. More gifts to the journalism field, he suggested, are forthcoming.
“I’m averse to too much attention, but this is a way of putting my money where my mouth is,” he said in an interview. “Having your name on something means you’re really standing up for something and getting really serious about it.”
The gift will be made through Newmark’s foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
In addition to funding journalism, the foundation works to reduce barriers blocking women from entering the tech field, support veterans, and increase voter participation.
Seeking Diversity
CUNY was attractive, Newmark said, because it is the only public journalism graduate school in the Northeast, and its students come from a variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds.
“It serves the grass-roots,” he said.
Historically, 60 to 65 percent of the program’s incoming students have been women, and more than half are black, Latino, or Asian-American, according to Sarah Bartlett, the school’s dean. Graduates of the school, which was founded in 2006, have landed jobs at legacy media companies, like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post as well as more recent start-ups, including Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox, Bartlett said.
Training a diverse group of reporters can help achieve Newmark’s main mission: restoring trust in the news media, Bartlett said.
“We spend a lot of time talking to employers who recognize that having a lot of white, male journalists from very elite colleges and from middle- and upper-class family structures can be very limiting when they’re covering issues of income inequality, racism, issues of sexual harassment and sexual identity,” she said. “It’s very hard to cover a community when you have no one from the newsroom who is of the community.”
Long Courtship
Bartlett first met Newmark four years ago. Shortly after she was tapped to lead the program, she and Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the school, went on a fundraising trip to Northern California to test the waters with various tech moguls, including the Craigslist founder. At the time, recalled Bartlett, Newmark seemed more interested in his veterans work. But the two kept in touch.
Less than two years later, during the 2016 presidential race, Newmark began to give the school a second look. His first gift was a $10,000 contribution to Electionland, a collaborative reporting project on ballot-
access issues hosted at CUNY that ProPublica and others helped organize.
He followed up with $1.5 million for the News Integrity Initiative. Housed at CUNY, the effort is a fund that supports research into ways to improve news literacy and squash the spread of misinformation over traditional and social media. Bartlett says the idea for the fund was spawned during conversations with Newmark and credits the philanthropist with bringing others on board. Ultimately, eight other organizations chipped in, bringing the fund’s total to $14 million.
Bartlett said the conversations continued and became more intense. Newmark began spending more time on campus, meeting with her, with professors, and with students.
During a talk in her office with Newmark and Jarvis, Bartlett said Newmark kept expressing a wish to accelerate the pace of his giving. The idea of creating an endowment had certainly entered Bartlett’s mind. In fact, it was a big goal of hers. But because the school had such a recent vintage, getting people to take the request seriously was a challenge.
And here was Newmark, sitting in her office, talking about a need to go big.
“Finally, after hearing this a couple of times, I decided to go for it,” she said. “I took a deep breath and decided to put it on the table.”
Learning From History
Over the past decade, newsroom leaders and academics have reminded Newmark of the lessons he first learned from his U.S. history teacher at Morriston High School in New Jersey. Newmark says that teacher, Anton Schulzki, taught him that “a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy.”
Lessons from Schulzki and classes at the nearby Jewish community center helped instill a philosophy that Newmark draws upon when he decides where to give. A sense of fairness, equal opportunity, and mutual respect are critical to the American experience, he said.
“My philanthropy is based on finding areas where people stand up for other people,” he said. “Journalism underlies this all. In a democracy, journalism gives us the idea that we’re all in this together and we need to do it together.”
Newmark said his experience as an engineer and entrepreneur also informs his giving. In those roles, he’s gotten into the habit of tinkering with a process and exploring new ways to approach a problem. But to succeed, whether in business or in tackling social problems, he said, he needs “force multipliers.”
“I think of myself as a guy who helps people get stuff done,” he said. “I’ve been lucky enough to do well in business, and that’s nice, but right now people all around us need a hand. I find the people who help others, and I help them. I help the helpers.”
Checking Facts
In recent years Newmark has collaborated with the Knight Foundation on several projects, including a $1.2 million grant to the Duke University Reporters’ Lab to develop an automated fact-checking tool.
Knight’s president, Alberto Ibargüen, said the CUNY gift was pure Newmark: It will support training on the most recently developed technology in journalism and make the profession accessible to people from various backgrounds.
Having the center named for Newmark is a reflection of his total commitment, Ibargüen said.
“This is a guy who is just absolutely, maniacally focused on issues of authenticity and veracity as a way of getting trust,” Ibargüen said. “Craigslist doesn’t work if you don’t have trust. That’s what he did there, and that’s his focus with regard to journalism.”
Since the 2016 election, philanthropists and foundations have steered more than $1 billion to journalism grantees, according to figures compiled by the Foundation Center.
This year, the MacArthur Foundation plans to spent $26 million on journalism grants. The Omidyar Network has made the support of investigative journalism a pillar of a broader $100 million strategy to combat hate speech and get citizens more involved in the policy-making process. The Hewlett Foundation committed $10 million over two years for research on the spread of propaganda on social media.
Other efforts, like a $1 million gift last year from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, have gone to directly support journalists.
Still, more is needed, according to Ibargüen, who hopes Newmark’s Bay Area peers offer up megagifts of their own.
“That means you, Zuckerberg. That means you Larry Page, and that means you, Jeff Skoll,” he said. “We need more money.”
