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A fascinating tidbit buried in a story about Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin's allegations of child prostitution on Craigslist: Susan MacTavish Best, Craigslist spokeswoman and girlfriend of CEO Jim Buckmaster, claims that Craig Newmark "is no longer involved in the company's daily affairs," according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And indeed, Newmark, the company's founder, though he was listed on the Craigslist management page a week ago, no longer appears there. Newmark has certainly made enough money, thanks to a 2004 stock purchase by eBay, to retire on. And his "team bio," still online, notes that he's "embarrassed" that the site is named after him. But for the geeks who still idolize him, the idea of a Craigslist without Craig would be hard to bear. Update: We heard from Newmark. His comments, after the jump.



In a couple of conversations on phone and Facebook, Newmark said he was still working at the company as a "customer service representative." He had no explanation for Best's comments about his lack of involvement in the company's "daily affairs" — "customer service" seeming to be one of those "daily affairs" companies must deal with — save to say that she told him she didn't make the comments attributed to her by the Journal-Constitution, and that he's still engaged in "heavy customer service" every day. As to his disappearance from the Craigslist management page, Newmark didn't know why it had been recently changed to remove him, but pointed out that the updated page now matched his claims, put forward for years, not to be involved in the company's management.