Craigslist founder Craig Newmark just published the results of a survey he commissioned on public trust of the media. The results are shocking. Not just the fact that only 22 percent of people find newspapers a “very credible” source of information. But that 21 percent of people somehow consider cable and network news “very credible.” People do realize that newspaper reporting is what drives the cable news cycle, right? That and useless celebrity ephemera.

Anyway, here’s Newmark’s credibility breakdown by political party, gender, race and age.

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Throughout the media industry, fact checking departments have been decimated by budget cuts, and it shows. Inaccuracies in news media are becoming increasingly common, and short of the financial windfalls needed to hire back professional fact checkers, there are no easy answers. But Craig Newmark has a few ideas.

The Craigslist founder outlined his ideas in a private email, which Jim Romenesko published with permission. They include “a network of networks of factcheckers” like those at politifact.com, factcheck.org, and sunlightFoundation.com, and a “widget or truth goggle” that could reference a database for previously fact checked information.

Both sound like valuable tools for any news organization, but can anything really compare to having paid fact checkers on staff? What do you think, dear readers? Will a widget bring accuracy back to the news media? And do you have any suggestions of your own?

Even though the numbers for Jesse Draper‘s web interview program The Valley Girl Show are modest, both her audience and guest list encompass a solid chunk of Silicon Valley movers and shakers. When the UCLA acting grad’s fourth season launches in November, she will be expanding her reach to fast food restaurants and additional mobile devices via partner Mediafly.

Per a nice write-up this weekend in the San Francisco Chronicle, Draper (pictured) seeded her web show with earnings from 2007-2009 acting work on Nickleodeon’s The Naked Brothers Band. The 25-year-old daughter of venture capitalist Tim Draper (and niece of actress Polly Draper) has managed, out of a donated studio in San Mateo, to cultivate a lot of fun, goofy moments:

She ate escargot with Tesla’s Elon Musk (in honor of the just-released S Car), smashed up a TV with Justin.tv founder Justin Kan, wrapped presents with M.C. Hammer, had clean-tech VC Vinod Khosla slather her with green paint and gave Craig Newmark a lava lamp she’d bought on Craigslist. Ted Turner, Mike Tyson, Eric Schmidt and Scott McNealy have also appeared.

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There’s a proprietary online commerce aspect to this story; mammoth Ebay suing ubiquitous Craigslist. We look at it and all we see is the California gubernatorial race. Lefty Craig Newmark vs. righty Meg Whitman.

Didn’t Meg Whitman testify for the competency of Sarah Palin on the presidential campaign trail in 2008?

Where’s our popcorn…this should be good.

Smart Money reports:

San Jose, Calif.-based eBay filed a lawsuit alleging that Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster diluted eBay’s stake in online classified group to 24% from 28% through a “self-dealing” and secret scheme to issue more stock. EBay says the dilution caused the company to lose its right to elect a Craigslist board member.

San Francisco-based Craigslist has filed a countersuit alleging that eBay took advantage of its investment to steal confidential information that it used to create a competing classified service called Kijiji.com.

EBay and Craigslist have denied the allegations against them.

Via I Want Media

Dr. Stephen Kent out of the University of Alberta is the world expert on Scientology:

He has published research on Scientology, the Children of God/The Family, fundamentalist Mormon polygamy, and other new and alternative religions operating in Canada, the United States, and around the world.

FBLA: What are your thoughts on the news that Wikipedia has banned Scientologists from editing their page on its site?

SK: My understanding is that the ban is not a blanket prohibition against all Scientologists, but instead bans edits coming from one IP address that goes to a particular Scientology building. People wanting to edit articles must register, which allows the Wiki editors to monitor their submissions and potentially ban them if their comments consistently prove to be disruptive.
Scientology must continue to remove critical material about it from the Internet, so this issue will continue.

FBLA: Why do they need to remove all critical material?

SK: Scientologists consider critical material about the organization to be what they call ‘entheta,’ and the organization’s policy is to remove entheta from the environment. The issue for Scientologists is not accuracy but rather negativity, and the group works tirelessly on its public relations presentation. The organization has fought a losing battle to keep ‘entheta’ off of the Internet. Undoubtedly that material kills interest on the part of many who otherwise might have explored the beliefs and practices. It also has helped some members read critical information and defect.

Interesting stuff. Who thinks Dr. Kent should dress up as Craig Newmark for Halloween?

Craiglist’s Craig Newmark will be there, along with Fred Durham of Cafe Press, Bruce Livingstone and Kelly Thompson of iStockphoto and Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology.

And our fearless leader – Laurel Touby will be making the rounds. Today is the last day to get the ‘early bird’ rate on the conference. But Laurel said she will hook you up with the special rate until the end of the week because you’re FBLA readers and you deserve it. Seriously.

From their site:
What’s UGCX all about?

User-generated content is a rapidly developing revolution in media. “Average Joe” internet users now wield power over online content, and new business models are emerging in response to this shift. UGCX is the first conference and expo organized to bring together content-trendsetters and business leaders in various fields to examine how these worlds collide and what the future holds. This new mediabistro.com event will unlock the knowledge businesses and non-profits need to respond to this shift.

The conference is Feb. 9-10 in San Jose. Register here.

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist got interviewed about the future of journalism in the LA Times. Let’s not forget that newspapers are struggling in part because of the ad revenue lost to Craigslist. Not that we don’t love the list…because we do.

Here’s part of the interview after Huffington Post is mentioned:

Jon Healey: That’s a great business model too — you don’t pay your writers.

Newmark: There is that, and I am one of them. But we’ll see, then, looser, weaker networks of talented writers who maybe wind up being some of your natural allies who may feed into your organization or similar. But networking is going to be probably the biggest critical success factor, as we used to say at IBM, and right not it’s the size of your network that may determine success in large part. And you will be, you know, involving amateur writers, since some of them will provide some really useful stuff to you and help out.

I would like to see networks of fact-checkers, but I don’t know if that’s exciting or sexy enough for people to do. In my fantasy life, we would see fact-checking becoming a new, distinct, big profession, but that’s probably just my fantasy life since I can’t see people paying people to do full-time fact-checking, at least in substantial numbers.

Healey: We have at least two full-time blogs in L.A. devoted to fact-checking the L.A. Times on a daily basis.

Okay, LAObserved is one. What’s the other one? Patterico?

Embedded video from CNN Video

No way! Craig Newmark of Craigslist knows we exist?! Or if not ‘we’ of Fishbowl LA…the other Fishbowl sites. You know the ones on the other coast…the ones that think they are so cool just because they wake up WAY before we do. Whatevs.

Our sister site FBNY called our attention to this NYT piece about Craig Newmark, the “Craig” of Craigslist who is dismissing the accusation that he single-handedly destroyed newspapers but is — funny enough — financing investigative journalism.

In the face of this expansion, Mr. Newmark is becoming more of a public figure, capitalizing on his success to promote causes that include supporting the Barack Obama campaign and financing investigative journalism — not, he insists, to compensate for any damage Craigslist has done to the newspaper business, which he calls “an urban myth.”

Newmark has donated up to $20,000 to various journo organizations including factcheck.org, sunlightfoundation.com and publicintegrity.org. In case you’re looking. And let’s face it, you are.

At the mediabistro.com big-ol’ blogger party this weekend, Craig’s List founder Craig Newmark told us he was scheduled to undergo a quick outpatient surgery to remove his gallbladder today.

While docs have him open and under, they’re also planning to remove a bit of his liver which they’ll use in a genetics study of patients with high cholesterol. Before we could open our big, fat mouths, he cautioned us not to make any “chopped liver” jokes. So we won’t.

Instead, we’ve taken out an ad, requesting Craig’s List-combers to write the yuks for us. We’ll send him the best ones. Unless he sends us a cease-and-desist letter first.

Feel better, Craig.