An entrepreneur who made a fortune thanks to his digital disruption of the newspaper industry has joined forces with a fearsome nonprofit watchdog publication that is expanding its coverage of the tech industry.
Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, the online service that drained the classified advertising revenue that once fueled the newspaper industry, has been a robust sponsor of U.S. journalism in recent years.
Now his foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, has given $6 million to Consumer Reports, allowing it to keep a closer watch over digital products and platforms. It is the largest donation in the history of the organization, which was established in 1936.
Past beneficiaries of Newmark's largesse have included New York Public Radio, a fledgling investigative site called the Markup and a New York-centric journalistic startup, the City. He also gave so much to the graduate journalism program at the City University of New York — $20 million — that it was renamed the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Consumer Reports, a lion of public-service journalism that can claim, among other things, to have spread early awareness of the dangers of cigarettes in the 1950s, announced on Thursday the creation of a Digital Lab division. Built on the gift from Newark's foundation, the lab will be crash-testing not cars but the digital tools that have become a part of everyday life.
Marta Tellado, Consumer Reports' chief executive, said the lab would allow the publication, known for its rigorous, impartial critiques, to apply its long-standing principles to a new set of consumer problems.
"Companies like Google and Facebook have shown that while they're offering great conveniences, they aren't always policing themselves, and a lot of our laws are not keeping pace with innovations," Tellado said.
The new Digital Lab is not the first foray by Consumer Reports into monitoring tech. In 2017, it led a consortium that established the so-called Digital Standard, a benchmark against which products can be measured. Samsung recently fixed certain smart televisions after Consumer Reports, applying the standard, found they could be hacked.
"Consumer Reports are the right people to continue doing the work they've always been doing," Newmark said in an interview. "It's just that new technologies are more pervasive and invasive than other technologies."
Consumer Reports, he added, "started doing this with smart TVs."
"I love TVs. I love watching TV," he said. "I don't love TV watching me."
