Craig Newmark is as close to the devil as you can get, if you listen to newspaper execs who are watching their classified ad revenues melt away as users flock to Craigslist.

But he doesn't worry about it too much:

But Newmark doesn't feel guilty about the ongoing shift of classified dollars away from the medium. While he is a champion of more investigative reporting in newspapers -- which he admits costs money to fund -- he wasn't going to let the crowd boo-hoo about revenue woes. He deftly mentioned newspapers' high profit margins -- somewhere in the ballpark of 10% to 20% -- as proof there is plenty of money to feed investigative journalism and the newsroom. "I don't understand what the problem is," he said.

The key thing that Newmark did was that his business model for Craigslist is for him to charge enough to make an acceptable profit, not to see how much he can take out of your pocket before you complain. He's winning the price war because his competition is too stupid to realize that the days of giant profit margins are over, that charging people huge amounts of money for a classified ad just doesn't cut it anymore. The longer that newspapers resist this change, the more they will suffer.