Far be it from The Scrapbook to judge the philanthropic impulses of the extremely wealthy, but the recent announcement of a $20 million gift to the City University of New York struck us as a bit rich. The money, which will fund the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, was the gift of Craig Newmark, described by the New York Times as “the Craigs­list entrepreneur who arguably forced the newspaper industry to change its business model after his website put a dent in the lucrative classified ads business.”

Well, everything is “arguable,” we suppose. But Craigslist’s free ad listings did far more than “put a dent” in the “lucrative” business of classified ads. Newmark’s website, launched in 1996, was the first horseman of the Internet apocalypse that gutted the newspaper industry. It extinguished many small, local newspapers that relied on classified ad revenue to stay afloat. The company’s trademark hippie purple peace sign notwithstanding, a Harvard Business School study found that Craigslist led to “an increase in subscription prices, a decrease in circulation, and . . . a decrease in display-ad rates.” Newmark’s network of free sites, the Economist noted, “has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers’ income.”