Craig Newmark doesn’t accept the charge that Craigslist is a threat to newspapers. In fact, he says classified ad managers like what he’s doing.

They pretty consistently like what we are about and our spirit, even though we are making their lives much harder. It's a perverse phenomenon, but that's the way things are evolving . . . The greatest threat, though, to classifieds in newspapers has more to do with the rather aggressive marketing done by some of the specialized classifieds-related sites like the jobs sites, the car sites. They market aggressively. They will do things like calling up or e-mailing advertisers, doing a really heavy sell, and that takes a lot more business from newspaper classifieds than we do.

He’s right about one thing: If newspapers lose jobs and car listings, they’ll find themselves in a drought of revenue. But I guess Newmark forgot that his site posts an awful lot of job ads. Car ads, too. I guess since he’s not even trying to get those ads, he figures it doesn’t hurt newspapers as much. I don’t see the difference.