A little interview in which Craig Newmark exhausts me

Sarah Scire: What do you wish you had known earlier about funding journalism?

Craig Newmark: I really didn’t understand that audience development and related marketing needed to be a really big deal for everyone in journalism, and didn’t understand that very few really good journalists were aware of that, but I’ve started discussing that in maybe every engagement.

Also, I’ve only recently understood the danger, reputationally and otherwise, that effective journalists face, but I’ve started discussing that in maybe every engagement. I’m still directing some resources to real efforts to keep them safe.

I think Craig Newmark is a good guy doing good things for journalism. I've met him once or twice and he seems very nice. I wish this realization happened far earlier and I know the reason it didn't is because the right people were not put in the room with him.

This interview is 5 questions long and by the end of it I felt like I had aged a million years.

In 2026 to read an article about the state of the journalism industry that says 'I've recently discovered that audience engagement and reporter safety is important' is incredibly depressing to see from one of journalism's most enthusiastic funders.

The need to do strategic, well-thought-out, audience engagement is something I and others have been discussing for years. Decades actually. This was the topic of presentations I did in college. And I am hardly the expert on this front. Better people than I were having this conversation.

Then there's the question of safety--I watched GamerGate happen in real time right after I'd stopped doing gaming journalism. This has been an issue for over a decade and people have spoken and written excellently on it.

I can't fault Newmark though, because at least he has realized this. Many many news organizations still haven't. It's been a frustrating lifetime in the media industry to see news orgs learn and lose these lessons over and over and over and over.

You know why?

Because if you are a journalism organization and the money is tight, rightly or wrongly, the first people who get dropped are the people who do not produce definitive journalism product. So people doing safety and audience. Then a year later the organization is trying to figure out why no one is reading the journalism they produced and they must learn this lesson all over again. Rinse and repeat.

Newmark pulling funding isn't going to help. It's going to do the opposite. He's supported great work and places that produce great work. In short order everywhere he pulled funding from will fire people and, guess what, audience and safety will be first on the chopping block.

A lot of stories won't get written and a lot of people who are trying to solve the exact problems Newmark has correctly identified with journalism as an industry are going to get fired because he pulled funding. I know for a fact it is already happening. Almost every audience specialist I've ever known has reluctantly left journalism because their organizations, big and small, didn't support them.

Pulling back on funding won't fix anything. Other funders have, unfortunately, not had this realization. When they do--once in a blue moon--remember that the only journalism more useless than non-existent journalism is work that no one reads, the inevitable result is that the work of building a promotion plan is put on unqualified people with no time to do it because they are in structures built only to produce writing and nothing else.

I'm glad Newmark is continuing to fund safety. That's good, we need that. But no matter how much money you have, there's no way to get small non-profit journalism outlets to suddenly care about audience in the way he's discussing. Instead, this will be a seismic shift in funding that hits outlets when they're in the worst environment for finding funding that I've seen in my lifetime. Some will go under or become stripped back lesser versions of themselves.

Newmark should be using the secret power of funders to solve this problem--connections. He should connect people who do this to grantees who need it. The most common people to run small-to-medium non-profit media are top-of-field journalists who focus on writing and editing. They mostly don't know audience development and don't have the contacts to figure it out.

Instead, he should be bringing those people to the table along with the funding. He should be doing funding of some entity that's setting themselves up to work with publishers on short engagements that can be attached to grants.

Lots of people in media are out there, thinking about, doing, and trying to convince others to do this. They often go ignored. They are not doing the exciting job. They don't get sent to be in the room with Craig Newmark to explain to him why grants should be structured to include their jobs or why what they do is important. That is why he's come to this realization about 20 years late.

I hope that, with this revelation, Newmark finds those people who didn't get sent to meet him, funds them in ways that get them in the room with him in the future, and sets something up that lets them bring their services to the many journalistic outlets that still haven't learned the lesson he has.

Newmark: Seriously, think a lot about audience development and safety.