Craigslist donates $1.6 million to UC Berkeley to create 'New Media'

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Jan 17, 2008 | by William Brand

BERKELEY _ Craigslist, one of the sites on the World Wide Web that has changed communication and commerce in the modern world is donating $1.6 million to the University of California, Berkeley to create the first endowed faculty chair in "new media."

The donation will be paired with $1.5 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support research and scholarship at the newly created Berkeley Center for New Media.

UC Berkeley chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau said the donation recognizes the Berkeley Center as a major research center "where scholars and students can explore the powerful effect of new media and think rigorously about how new media will continue to change our lives and perceptions."

"We're really excited and happy about this," said Center Director Ken Goldberg, a professor of engineering. "When we were looking for a new chair, someone joked, 'Why don't you go to craigslist?' "

"That's what happened," Goldberg said.

He adds that he has known craigslist founder Craig Newmark and chief executive officer Jim Buckmaster for several years and as the New Media Center was developing, the idea of an endowed professor made sense to them. Buckmaster will be a founding member of the center's executive advisory board.

"They're very interested in research and new directions for new media and they're interested in doing socially constructive actions," Goldberg said. "For instance, one of the things we're working on is a method of recommending and rating charities.

The endowment, Goldberg says, is an endorsement of the emerging field of new media. "It takes new media to a whole new level," he said. "What we're trying to do is build, a rigorous, scholarly center."

Newmark founded craigslist in 1995 as an e-mailed list of events in the San Francisco. Based n English-language page views, it's now the fifth-largest Internet company in the world. It's the most used classified ad service worldwide.

"We're thrilled to support UC Berkeley at a time when unprecedented wealth is being lavished upon private institutions," Buckmaster said in a statement. "Berkeley's academic excellence and history of challenging convention mean a lot to us at craigslist, and we rely upon technological innovations from the UC Berkeley community every day. We're excited to partner with the Berkeley Center for New Media, as it is uniquely positioned to change the very way we think about new media," he said.

The Center for New Media is one of five cross-disciplinary centers recently established by the university. The center supports research and teaching of over 100 faculty members, advisors and scholars from many UC Berkeley departments including architecture, philosophy, film studies and art history, engineering, journalism, law and the Berkeley Art Museum.

New media is a wide-ranging field, Goldberg says. Right now the emphasis is on digital _ the Internet; photography, art. "But I don't know what the future holds. In 20 to 30 years, new media may mean something entirely different," he said.

The New Media chair may come from the UC Berkeley faculty or from elsewhere, Goldberg said. He also hopes to use some of the proceeds from the endowment to cover salaries of visiting professors and lecturers.