“I’m not as articulate as I need to be,” he said. “I might not be the nerd people really need, but I’m the nerd they’ve got.”

Pause. “Is that quotable? I kind of like that,” he said.

Mr. Newmark’s media-giving spree began in June, with a $20 million gift to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which put his name on the door. This met with some criticism. Felix Salmon, a correspondent for Axios, tweeted that “it’s utterly bizarre to name a journalism school after the man who almost single-handedly destroyed local newspapers.”

Mr. Newmark followed that up last month with another $20 million gift to The Markup, a new site dedicated to investigating technology. He also gave to a new nonprofit effort called The City.

His media ventures differ from those of his peers — not only Mr. Benioff but also Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, who bought The Washington Post, and Laurene Powell Jobs, who is the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and bought the magazine The Atlantic.

“I’m not the kind of guy to own an operation,” Mr. Newmark said. “I help, then I get out of the way, then I stay out of the way. That’s my strength.”

He disagrees that he helped kill newspapers. In the back garden of the Reverie Cafe, near San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and not far from his house, he said he was getting a bum rap.