Craigslist Gives $1.6M to UC Berkeley
Money Goes To Its New Media Center

Jan 22 | archive | subscribe

Craigslist CEO, Jim Buckmaster, and Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, pose in front of the Craigslist office in San Francisco, California.

Craigslist, one of the sites on the Internet that has changed communication and commerce in the modern world, is donating $1.6 million to the University of California, Berkeley to help create the first endowed professorship at the school's five-year-old new media center.

Jim Buckmaster, CEO of the San Francisco-based community networking Web site, will be a founding member of the executive advisory board for the Berkeley Center for New Media, university officials said Thursday.

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

The center's mission is to advance new media in the public interest and to explore its effect on culture, said engineering professor Ken Goldberg, who was appointed director of the center in July. Additional money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation will bring the initial endowment to $3.1 million to support research and scholarship at the newly created Berkeley Center for New Media.

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