Craig Newmark, the founder of the online classifieds website Craigslist, is donating $20 million to the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Journalism.
“I think right now in this country, we’re in a kind of information war and people of good will need to stand up and do something real,” Newmark told CNNMoney.
The graduate school will also be renamed the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
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Newmark, who has no connection to CUNY, told CNN that he chose the school because it is a public institution with a diverse population and students that rely on financial aid, as he once did.
“The CUNY journalism school does a lot to push forward the practice of quality journalism and does so by giving opportunity to everyone, so that’s a big part of what I’m doing,” he said.
“Craig Newmark’s extraordinary generosity ensures that our still-young school will have the resources and flexibility it needs to remain at the forefront of journalism education,” Sarah Bartlett, the dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, said in a statement, according to CNN.
Craigslist, which Newmark launched in 1995, is among the classified websites that have often been cited as a contributing factor to the decline of print journalism, which traditionally relied on print classified ads for funds.
Newark noted that the decline of the newspaper industry “began long before” he started Craigslist.
In past years, Newark has given tens of millions to other journalism organizations, including the Columbia Journalism Review, the Poynter Institute and ProPublica.
“The deal is, we’re in a crisis of information. This is seriously a ‘we’re all in this together, all hands on deck situation,'” Newmark said.