BayNewser is reporting today from the Digital Media Conference West at Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco.

Craig Newmark said today that the impact of Craigslist on newspapers—and the way it took over classified advertising—has been magnified. That's old news, of course. More importantly though, he said, newspapers have a "much bigger" problem: People simply don't trust them.

He pointed to the pre-Iraq war weapons of mass destruction reporting as well as reporting that preceded the economic collapse. In both instances, Newmark said, there actually was good reporting going on, but it was "buried in the back of newspapers" and it "wasn't repeated."

"People can see that somehow something has gone very wrong with that aspect of news," he said. "Meanwhile you see that the newspapers and on TV, there's still this pretense of objectivity, where you bring two sides of the story, even if it means you bring on someone that you know is going to come up there to mislead people. That doesn't inspire trust."