NEW YORK CITY -- Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and a Case Western Reserve University alumnus, donated $20 million to the City University of New York's journalism school.

He's given to CUNY before -- $10,000 in 2016 to the school's election coverage and $1.5 million for a research grant in 2017. He gained an interest in journalism about 10 years ago when he started going to conferences, he told The New York Times.

Newmark started what would become Craigslist, the major online classified advertisements site, in 1995. Many say that sites like Craigslist led to the classified advertisements in newspapers becoming irrelevant, putting a major dent in newspaper revenue.

Newmark frequently donates to journalism efforts, including nonprofit newsroom ProPublica. He gave the investigative outlet $1 million in 2017. Newmark also give the Poynter Institute $1 million and Wikipedia $1.5 million.

"My motivation in helping is because, in our country right now, we are facing a crisis in getting trustworthy news out there to overwhelm the misinformation," he told The New York Times.

Newmark graduated with a bachelors in science in 1975 and a masters in science in 1977 from CWRU, afterwards moving to Boca Raton, Florida and then Detroit for a job with IBM.

It was when he moved to San Francisco in 1995 that he started an email list that would become Craigslist, according to Gizmodo.

CUNY's journalism school will now be named Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. The donation was made through the Craig Newmark Philanthropies.