Modish glasses. Weighing in at in briefs yes, I asked. He says hello to Nico the dog and Steve and Misha behind the counter, then I follow him to the back terrace, where the Exploder gets down on all fours to give Bob, a white cat, some fish treats from his pack. He wipes his hands on his black jeans. His phone rings. He pauses and rolls his head back, a sure sign that a joke is coming. The Exploder of Journalism has a hokey sense of humor forged by Oedipal issues; the life sentence inside the short, round body; and seventeen years at IBM, where managers crapped on him and did not recognize that underneath that pink-cheeked, abrasive demeanor was an action figure called the Exploder of Journalism.
I want to hail a cab, but this goes against his code, so we wait for the 43 bus. He sets his feet apart and his briefcase on the floor and surfs the bus like the nebbish superhero he is. When we get off, he leans in close. I brace myself for the warm breath of a personal confidence.
Up some stairs to his office. A huge guy at a computer that looks like a modular couch and appears to be running a nuke plant swings around in his chair. All right, yes—it is. It is Craig. I n the past few months, I and countless others in the mainstream media have awakened to the fact that something we thought was benign and even modestly beneficial, if we happened to have a room to rent or something to sell, was in fact a wild beast, loose in the orchards.
A simple and free online classified-ad service started by the gnomish Craig Newmark in San Francisco eleven years ago, Craigslist is a where young urban people conduct much of the traffic of their lives, including renting apartments, finding lost pets, and getting laid in the middle of the day, and is b thereby destroying classified revenues for big-city newspapers, which are already in crisis, and so it has become c the symbol of the transformation of the information industry.
Rocked in a Bay Area cradle of left-wing values, Craigslist has built a huge national community by word of mouth. The site is free and without advertising with the exception of help-wanted ads in three markets , and it gets more than 3 billion page views per month 10 million actual users a month , ranking it seventh on the Net, not so far behind Google and eBay. Yes, half a million many of these repeats. Maybe billions. His users all know that. During the transit strike, Scott Anderson, a blogger for the Tribune Company, noticed with sadness that the ride-share space on Newsday.
