Jeremy Mims

Cofounder of OwnLocal. Optimist.

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It’s the stories

I had a delightful conversation with Jennie 8. Lee about two months ago that hasn’t really left my mind. In addition to being generous and kind with her advice, she’s the kind of person we love to work with at OwnLocal (there’s a reason she sits on our advisory board).

We spend a lot of time at OL talking about how we make newspapers money. We’re actually getting pretty good at this. But we often spend so much time on the revenue generation side that we can forget at times why we do what we do.

It’s the stories.

We’re not the ones telling them but our revenue generation products make them possible every day.

Jennie just has a way of making all of this crystal clear.

Because of so many conversations like this one, I have purpose, hope, and inspiration to redouble our efforts.

While we work hard all the time, sometimes the “why” of what we do just comes into focus.

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Craig Newmark, the Principled Jerk

I was recently approached by a newspaper owner about an idea he thought Craig Newmark might be interested in. In light of the recent shutting down of PadMapper, reopening of PadMapper, and Craigslist’s lawsuit I think it makes sense to post the exchange from a few months ago:

I would like to approach Craigslist with an idea. Given the state of local newsrooms, I do not think that Craig imagined that his efforts would lead to the end of watchdog and investigative journalism, leaving only the trash that fills most websites as the papers get thinner.

If Craigslist were to become the classifieds platform for newspapers, that might fix the problem.

Here was my response:

Yes. But Craig won’t. There would be if Craig were rational. The problem with Craig Newmark is he’s a principled jerk. He has very odd priorities. Craig spends his days manually removing flagged spam in a terminal view...

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