American media designer and consultant Alan Jacobson has had some luck convincing newspaper publishers outside the US to sign off on some fairly disruptive redesigns for classifieds. One interesting example is aviso-oportuno.com.mx, which (via Jacobson’s firm) redid its web classifieds in a way that severely simplified the interface.

aviso-oportuno.com.mx is the separate classifieds brand for the Mexican newspaper El Universal, which also publishes four other, separately branded online verticals.

Take a look at the new interface (click image to go to the website), compared to the original which follows. Mousing over one of the colored category blocks expands the box down to show more fields; in this image the red category (autos) has been expanded.

Obviously, the site’s main page is much more Google-like in its simplicity. The old design — which is fairly typical of newspaper classifieds homepages — is complicated and confusing. Jacobson believes that such cluttered design hinders users, and is part of the reason that alternatives like Craigslist are favored by many online users.

Jacobson describes the thinking behind the redesign in a comment elsewhere on this website. There he notes that such changes are harder to make at US newspaper websites:

“These changes may seem elementary, but we’ve found that even simple changes to improve usability are difficult or impossible to make at papers in the US. That’s one reason why users prefer Craigslist — it’s easier to use than newspaper sites.”

What do you think? Is there merit in “Google-izing” online classifieds sections?

When is the newspaper industry going to stop reacting and start to act? Maybe we should be first with something.

We want someone to SAVE the oldest news gathering and communications industry in the world? The rest of the world should be saying, “How do we keep up with newspapers?” Who started the classified business? NEWSPAPERS DID!

There was probably some smart classified manager out there, several years ago, with an idea much like Craigslist but the publisher or the parent company would not invest because it was not in the budget. Now they are budgeting for less of a return on the dollar, or cutting the quality of their product to make sure they do get the same return.

This industry needs to fund a central developmental organization to promote the current products and develop, not just new twists, but new innovations. Waiting for the next threat, and reacting with some wimpy promotion is NOT a plan!

If you ride a dead horse long enough you will eventually be forced to dismount.

To: Craig and Jim
From: Steve (on behalf of the newspaper industry)

(OK, no, I do not actually speak for the newspaper industry; nor does ReinventingClassifieds.com. But I write this letter to you with the newspaper industry’s, journalism’s, and consumers’ best interests at heart. If any of those folks don’t agree with me, I’m sure they’ll let me know.)

Guys, congratulations on your continued success. Your ideals of putting service to the community above profit and personal gain are admirable. You have created a public service that benefits millions of people and saves them many millions of dollars. Craigslist is now the 7th most trafficked site on the Internet, and seems to exhibit no signs of slowing down. Bravo.

Craigslist has done much good. How about saving journalism, too, guys? (Photo: mulmatsherm, CC license)

That said, you have to know that Craigslist has played a role in the downturn of the newspaper industry. I’ve read your quotes and heard your speeches about Craigslist having only a minimal impact on newspaper classifieds. And I can buy that, to a degree. As both of you have said publicly many times, specialized employment, real estate, and auto sites have had a much greater impact; their sales reps have aggressively pursued traditional newspaper advertisers (while you have no sales force), and the growth of those companies has siphoned off billions of dollars that previously went to newspapers. (Although some of those companies now partner with newspapers.)

But there’s a reason I’m writing this letter to you guys, and not those niche ad online giants. I think you might want to help.

Let’s be clear here. I’m not suggesting that you help to save “newspapers.” Readers and advertisers are turning away from print at an increasing rate, and any publisher expecting you guys to help support an outdated medium would be crazy. (Or would they? Print editions of selected Craigslist content?) And I’m not suggesting that you should want to help newspapers save their traditional form of classified advertising. That old, weak model can’t stand up to Craigslist, which as you have acknowledged publicly many times is not at the technological bleeding edge, and especially not against niche job/home/car/dating sites that do live on the bleeding edge.

No, what I’m suggesting is that by helping out the newspaper industry, you’ll be helping save journalism — and thus helping out Craigslist’s users, who deserve to be kept well informed by a viable news media. For while newsPAPERS may be slowly fading from the scene, the type of journalism that is produced by newspaper companies is still sorely needed. The ability of the Fourth Estate to execute its watchdog role over government and business is being badly eroded by the thousands of newspaper journalists walking out the door in the last couple years, and continuing to do so at an alarming rate.

Do we really want to trust our democracy to emasculated newspaper journalism, plus TV and radio news? While broadcasters do produce some outstanding journalism, much TV and radio news is pretty weak, especially at the local level. It’s been the newspaper industry that has carried the banner for investigative journalism (and paid the costly bills for it). Independent web journalism in time may make up for the journalism we lose with newspapers’ decline (ProPublica signals a start; perhaps HuffingtonPost.com can help), but in the meantime things could get ugly.

Aren’t I being presumptuous in thinking that you guys would want to help out the newspaper industry? Am I suggesting that it’s your responsibility? Both answers are No.

Craig, I’ve been seeing your public statements, for some time now, where you’ve expressed concern about newspapers’ plight as it affects watchdog journalism. I noted Craigslist’s $1.6 million donation to endow a faculty chair at the Berkeley Center for New Media. I’ve heard your enthusiasm for ProPublica. I’ve read your comments urging newspapers to do more investigative reporting, not less. (”We need investigative reporters to ask tough questions.” Boston Globe, 6/15/08)

So I think that you want strong journalism. And you are in a position to create more of it. I will not assume that you feel as Google’s Eric Schmidt does; he says that for Google there’s a “moral imperative” to help newspapers. But if you do feel that way too in regard to Craigslist, outstanding.

What can Craigslist do? I hope this open letter succeeds in making you open to having some conversations with the newspaper industry about how to work together. Whatever the two of you do together, if anything, it should benefit Craigslist as well as newspapers and journalism, of course. Here are a few of my ideas. I hope that other readers of this open letter also will share their ideas.

Allow local newspapers to scrape Craigslist ads. I realize that you’ve kept Craigslist closed to this type of activity all these years, but how about opening up the walled garden a bit for a good cause? Allow the local newspaper(s) in the cities you serve to include Craigslist ads — just from that city, if that makes you more comfortable — in with their own classifieds. Ads from Craigslist would include the Craigslist brand and drive traffic back to the local Craigslist site; that’s good for you, in that it exposes your brand to (mostly older) newspaper readers who may not use Craigslist. (You’d think everyone knows Craigslist by now, but anecdotally I know that some older folks still don’t.) For the newspapers, adding Craigslist ads into newspaper classifieds sections reinvigorates them. “From Craigslist” ads could even show up in print classified sections of local newspapers (not just newspaper websites), reversing the shrunken sections’ relevance again. With a reinvigorated newspaper classifieds section, a newspaper could sell contextual display or banner advertising around it (which might support hiring back some of those lost journalists).

Allow consumers to place ads on Craigslist via newspaper websites. If a newspaper classifieds customer wants to place an ad via the paper’s online ordering system, permit them to also post it to the local Craigslist site as part of the process. Since ads coming from a newspaper site will be vetted, you know you won’t be getting spam ads. While most ads coming into Craigslist this way will be in no-fee categories, some will be for the few categories that Craigslist charges for. A newspaper site could collect that money, along with the fee paid for newspaper print/online placement, and send it to Craigslist, minus a commission. So while this is mostly a convenience for the consumer that makes using the newspaper classifieds more relevant, it’s also a revenue source. Craigslist users benefit by seeing more (high-quality) listings on Craigslist.

Add links on Craigslist to newspaper website classified sections. For example, on a Craigslist “bicycles for sale” category, add a link to the bicycles classifieds in the local paper’s website. This is good for Craigslist users; if they haven’t found the perfect bike on Craigslist, you point them to a good source for more bike ads. And of course this is great for newspapers, in that you drive traffic to their classifieds sites, helping them to be relevant again.

Add a news component to Craigslist. This is something I’ve heard you ponder in the past, Craig: some sort of community news component to be added to Craigslist sites. I’ve also heard you muse about wanting to identify the best news sources, and support the notion of citizen journalism. And I’ve read your comments about community: “Effectively, we’re a flea market, and flea markets I think are more about socializing than about commerce.” Craigslist represents a huge community in each of the cities it serves, and members of that community know a lot about what’s going on. It makes sense to add “news” to the Craigslist community, and tap that valuable local information resource that is the many Craigslist users.

So how about letting the local newspapers in your served cities help with that? I haven’t entirely thought this one through, but I think that by combining the oversight of a newspaper’s professional editors and reporters with the members of the Craigslist community, you’d end up with some real depth of community coverage at an acceptable (and possibly quite good) quality level. I’m no longer a fan of free-for-all citizen journalism — I can’t point you to successful examples — so I think that the best way for a Craigslist Local News component to be worthwhile is to combine the contributions of professional journalists and regular Joes and Janes. Newspapers will benefit by having a visible ongoing presence on one of the busiest sites on the web in their markets.

Those are a few of my ideas. Perhaps some of the people reading over our shoulders here will have more and better ideas. (Hint, hint … please comment!)

I know that the newspaper industry’s flagging health isn’t your responsibility, Craig and Jim, and I’ll agree that it’s not directly your fault. But with a little cooperation, we might find that Craigslist can help to turn around newspapers, and bring back some of those lost reporters and editors. I believe that Craigslist’s millions of users would appreciate that.

Will you help?

How bad do things have to get before publishers and classifieds managers are willing to do a complete (and badly needed) remodel of newspaper printed classified sections?

‘No one wants to be first. It’s amazing to me that they can’t/won’t/don’t want to try something different!’ -Bill Ostendorf

That question kept popping into my mind as I interviewed Bill Ostendorf, long-time newspaper designer and advertising consultant, about how to improve and save printed classifieds. As CEO of Creative Circle Advertising Solutions and Creative Circle Media Consulting (Providence, Rhode Island), Ostendorf is in the business of coming up with new ideas for improving newspaper operations and growing revenues, including lots of work with classifieds (print and online, but for this article I’m focusing mostly on print).

He and his team are creative folks, and just in the classifieds space they have at least a dozen concepts for improving and growing a newspaper’s classifieds that get presented each time they walk through a new door. Well, they’ve got many more ideas than that, of course, but those are the ones that Ostendorf is convinced will work at making a newspaper’s classifieds more successful — but haven’t been tried yet. As often as he’s pitched them to newspaper executives and gotten positive signals that they are good ideas that probably will work, no one has yet had the courage to implement them.

“I know they would work!” he says, and has the research to back it up. “But no one wants to be first. It’s amazing to me that (newspaper classifieds and advertising managers) can’t/won’t/don’t want to try something different!” (Ostendorf likens newspaper executives to lemmings, and says he wishes he could just push the first lemming over the cliff so the rest of the industry would follow.)

For example, one of the key weaknesses of most newspaper classifieds is that they are put off in their own section, which is read usually only by those people who are looking for something. Ostendorf believes, and he’s hardly alone in this thinking, that classifieds should also be included in other relevant sections throughout the newspaper:

• In the Sports section, add a featured grid of cars for sale. These ads can be from the regular Autos classified section, where advertisers have paid an extra upsell fee to be included in Sports.
• In the Gardening weekly section, include upsold ads from nurseries, landscape designers, and landscape construction companies.
• And so on.

Such classifieds-in-editorial-sections also present an opportunity for newspaper classifieds reps to sell some new and effective inventory outside of the traditional classifieds section, such as display ads from athletics stores and gyms to accompany the classifieds in the Sports section example above.

Ostendorf also advocates doing regular category classifieds specials, such as a weekly weddings and engagements ad special to accompany editorial content in the Lifestyles section. Or a special Graduates package in Lifestyles, where parents can buy classifieds ads — including photos — to celebrate their kids’ achievement. Do it in a classy way, he urges, with sophisticated design and graphics; avoid the cheesy balloons and flowers clip art.

The key point, says Ostendorf, is to add exposure of classifieds to newspaper readers who don’t know they want to buy something (like a set of golf clubs, say, spotted while reading the Sports section). That approach adds power to a classified ad beyond being in a section that a minority of newspaper readers don’t open because they’re not looking for something that particular day.

Stuck in the 1960s? You’ve got to be kidding

Getting such common-sense ideas implemented is tough in large part because of the conservative nature of middle-level newspaper classified managers, Ostendorf says. The typical classifieds section in a newspaper, after all, still looks like it could have been published in the 1960s. Not much has changed over the decades other than narrower columns and smaller type. There’s seldom color; there are seldom photos. “That’s so stupid, it’s hard to believe,” he says. (My head is nodding in agreement.)

And speaking of dumb, that would be a good way to describe the tiny type that many newspaper classifieds sections continue to use. I dare say I don’t need to explain why, as the average age of newspaper print readers continues to get older, small type is a really bad idea.

Ostendorf’s company does regular national surveys of newspaper readers on behalf of its clients. A 2006 survey focused on print classifieds found:

• 40% of classifieds readers said it’s hard to find things.
• 41% said classifieds sections are too hard to read.
• 38% said they’re too disorganized.
• 57% said they would use classifieds more if they were more legible.
• 59% said they would use classifieds more if photos accompanied ads.

That last point is a good innovation that more print classifieds sections should implement. (Though, frankly, to call adding photos an “innovation” is a bit silly. It’s more like an obvious feature that’s been ignored by many newspapers.) But the problem, complains Ostendorf, is that many newspaper front-end systems can’t accommodate classified advertisers uploading photos to accompany their ads.

That’s also a huge road block for many newspapers to effectively integrate print and online classifieds. “We’ve come up with lots of strategies (to do that), only to have newspaper executives say, ‘Our system can’t do that.’”

One key feature that Ostendorf would like to see is the ability for advertisers to change their ads from day to day; for example, for a 30-day run of a house for sale ad, the seller should be able to modify the price (or anything else) and have the change show up in the print edition the next day, as well as be reflected online.

Stamp out risk-averse thinking!

What is it going to take for newspapers to get serious about redesigning print classifieds so that they are relevant and successful in the Internet age? Ostendorf blames a risk-averse culture at many newspaper companies, where entrepreneurialism within the organization is still punished rather than rewarded. Many classifieds managers are compensated based on gross revenues or revenues minus costs, so trying something new and risky that has no guarantee of revenue success can mean personal loss. “It’s no wonder we’re not going anywhere,” he says.

What’s needed is for publishers to start providing incentives for classifieds managers to launch new initiatives, Ostendorf says, recognizing that two out of three may not work. Without a dose of entrepreneurialism, newspaper classifieds will continue to decline badly.

“Many of today’s classifieds managers were brought up in a culture where money was easy, so they didn’t take risks,” he says. They must not only be taught to take risks, but be incentivized to do so.

Newspaper classifieds are in a bad way. Things are truly awful enough that publishers and their classifieds managers can take some risks, try out some new ideas. Ostendorf has some for you to try.

• Monster.com rolling out new job sites. (Crains New York Business) Career site operator Monster Worldwide Inc. announced it will launch co-branded recruitment Web sites with more than a dozen local newspapers Monday, part of the company’s effort to push its brand in specific markets. …
• Zillow.com Offers Featured Listings With Newspaper Ads. (Online Media Daily) Real estate agents and home sellers buying a classified ad with their local newspaper will now be able to buy a featured for-sale or open house listing on Zillow.com at the same time. …
• Yahoo and the Newspaper Publishers: Playing with Fire (Ken Doctor) As Yahoo burns, the newspaper industry watches, hoping it won’t get singed. …

Newspapers need to be thinking foremost about creating services that are truly useful. Find a service that people will use on a regular basis and that benefits them in a substantial way, and you’ll win their hearts and loyalty. (That’s pretty much what Google does on a regular basis. Newspaper companies: not so much in comparison.)

Show this WashingtonPost.com phone message to get a dining deal.

Here’s a service that I long for. It will allow me to use my mobile phone to find a restaurant to eat at, near my current location, and give me a discount coupon that I can use by showing my phone to the waiter.

Such a service now exists, though on a limited scale.

This week, WashingtonPost.com announced a couple enhancements to its “Deals & Discounts” online shopping service: 1. adding restaurant discount coupons to existing retail offers from local D.C.-area stores, and 2. adding a mobile component.

The program is just getting started, but it points to a new type of advertising service that can, when built out fully, be as useful as Google. You’ll be able to find discount coupons for restaurants (or local retailers) by using a smartphone, and then use the phone itself as your “coupon” to get your discount. (The accompanying photo shows a text message that can be used to get a discount at the La Ferme restaurant in Chevy Chase, Maryland.)

Unfortunately, most of us don’t yet have mobile phones that have good web browsers like Apple’s iPhone or the new iPhone clones being introduced. For the unlucky with older phones with less-than-stellar web browsers (like my Blackberry, pictured here), the way to use this service is to go online first to find a coupon, or find one from a coupons directory in the newspaper.

Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive product development director Henry Tam explains that for now, using the old methods of print and the web is the way most people can get the program’s discount coupons onto their phones.

• Consumers can search the Discounts & Deals website, where they are given codes to send in via text message; they are returned a text message to their phone which serves as the “coupon.” (Show it to your waiter.)
• The Post also is now publishing a printed directory of discount coupons in the newspaper, with phone codes to text-message in to receive back a text-message coupon on your phone.

WashingtonPost.com’s discount coupon directory offers print and send-to-mobile-phone options.

While the prospect of doing all of this on your phone while you’re walking around downtown or sitting in your car is tantalizing, that’s still in the future for most people. But Tam says the service works well for most people even using a computer and web browser or print directory to load up the phone coupons.

Tam says that his team considered using graphical/multimedia coupons that would be displayed on phones, but decided to keep it simple with text messages (like the one in the photo above). This not only serves consumers who have older phones, but it keeps things simple for retailers and restaurateurs, who are not always the most tech-savvy.

The Post’s experiment with mobile coupons currently includes 30 D.C.-area restaurants. Wait staff had to be trained on the program, so they know to accept a mobile phone message from a diner as a discount coupon.

The mobile program started earlier this week, but Tam says it’s already showing some results, with 30 people showing the mobile coupons in restaurants in the first few days. Mobile likely will take a while to ramp up; one restaurant reported eight coupons redeemed through the Post program, only two of them mobile coupons and the rest printed out.

With the program in its infancy, there’s still plenty of innovation to come. Tam says that targeting coupons is in the plan, for example pushing out only coupons to Thai restaurants or only for certain neighborhoods.

In terms of ad sales, Tam says the Post ad sales force is including the Deals & Discounts program into existing print ad and online ad programs, as an add-on. “This has really resonated with the ad sales force,” he says.

What are future implications of this type of program? If it becomes normal procedure for diners to check their phones before walking into a restaurant in order to find a coupon, it could mean that most customers will be getting discounts. Will restaurateurs be OK with that? Tam says his team has pondered such issues and discussed them with local business owners. He thinks that most restaurants, especially, will be perfectly happy if most customers present coupons; they are most interested in “getting more butts in seats,” he says, and if coupons do that, restaurant owners are happy.

Specific to the restaurant category, some high-end eateries are not so much into offering “discount” or “buy one entree, get one free” offers; it’s a bit low-brow. But Tam says that the mobile and web coupons-on-demand can still work for them with special-event or other types of promotions.

For more information about the Post’s Deals & Discounts program, Tam can be contacted at henry.tam@wpni.com.

Craig Newmark (do I really need to explain that he’s the founder of Craigslist?) went before a group of editors at the Washington Post this week, and here’s a short video excerpt:

Newmark has long been saying that his network of free-classifieds sites is not a significant reason that newspapers have lost billions of dollars in classifieds revenue. That’s still his line, but here he does acknowledge that after speaking with lots of publishers and industry analysts, “They do tell me that we do have an effect on classifieds revenues, and it’s a real effect.” But he says “the magnitude of the effect has become exaggerated; it’s become an urban myth.”

He thinks that “overly aggressive sales reps” from niche jobs, auto, and real estate sites are the ones truly doing the damage to newspaper classifieds, because they’ve had good success drawing money away from newspapers.

I’ve always felt that Newmark is a genuinely good person who’s out to improve the world, but I also think he’s in denial about the impact he’s had on the newspaper industry. Now, if Craigslist hadn’t come along, something and someone else would have come in his place. So if Craig Newmark hadn’t been born, newspapers would still face the same dilemma.

But (editorializing ahead…) I don’t think that gets Newmark off the hook. I also hear in his public statements concern that the newspaper industry’s financial crisis is bad for journalism and for the public’s right to know what’s happening; he’s fearful that the investigative and watchdog role newspapers have played historically will diminish so badly that society will suffer.

I can’t help but think that Newmark and his Craigslist co-executives should ponder how to work with the newspaper industry in a way that benefits both — and perhaps saves some jobs of professional journalists. (They can’t all work for ProPublica, the investigative journalism start-up that Newmark admires.)

Craigslist has long been a notoriously closed system; other websites are not allowed to scrape its ads, and certainly other websites aren’t allowed to place ads into the Craigslist network. A policy change on the latter specific to newspapers, allowing them to feed qualified ads (that is, vetted and not spam) into local Craigslist sites, is one idea that could benefit both sides.

(ADDENDUM: Short response from Newmark, who thinks that his response to the Washington Post editors isn’t any different than previous statements. “Jim (Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO) and I have been saying, for years, the same thing: our effect is minor, according to publishers and industry analysts.”)

If you think ReinventingClassifieds.com targets a narrow niche (newspaper classifieds), here’s a site that’s even narrower: VideoIsNow.com.

Published by Alan Jacobson and Janet DeGeorge (who also run a video classifieds business, profiled here previously), the VideoIsNow blog features ongoing coverage of video advertising, with particular emphasis on video applications for classifieds.

It’s worth bookmarking. Or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Video ads like this will become increasingly common, and represent a largely untapped business opportunity

If newspaper designer and consultant Alan Jacobson is right, there is still a big opportunity open for newspapers to get in on something new online — and make some money from it — before others beat them to the punch, as has happened so many times before to newspapers on the Internet:

Video classifieds.

While that may not sound groundbreaking in the age of YouTube, applying personal video to classifieds is not yet something that has taken off. Consider Craigslist, the website network that has probably done more than any other to hurt newspaper classifieds. It has no video strategy (other than the occasional advertiser posting a link to a video), and its executives have expressed no desire to enhance the sites with video features. Continue Reading »

(Editor’s note: The author is a retired newspaper publisher turned academic, and was director of Knight Ridder’s 25/43 Baby Boomer readership project, which included an experimental reinvention of print classifieds, in 1990.)

In nine months since I was carried from the bloody arena of the newspaper business and ascended to the ivory tower, I’ve gained this perspective: Most newspapers don’t need the best new idea to grow their classifieds business. They mostly need to get better at executing what they already know.

I’m not an expert on classified advertising, so I can’t offer advice to anyone else. Here are a half dozen things I wish I’d done about classifieds and what I would do today:

• Stop obsessing about the national trends. Here in flyover country, there was no real estate boom and there’s no bust. Employment numbers remain healthy. Wichita Craigslist has been around for a few years, but hasn’t become an established marketplace in any vertical. It isn’t too late to save the business in Wichita or lots of other places in America.
• Invest in technology. We dithered endlessly over how to get our advertising and accounting systems to talk to each other. We found a hundred barriers to having our customers place and price their own ads. I should have been more insistently impatient about finding and financing solutions.
• Invest in people. Newspaper/Internet outside salespeople should be the most qualified and the best paid in the market. They should have the technical and clerical support they need to focus their time on selling to auto dealers, Realtors, employers and employment agencies. That wasn’t true at any of the newspapers I worked at over a span of 35 years.
• Get rid of the newspaper/Internet pricing silos. Advertisers should be sold eyeballs, not platforms. Companies allocate revenue to make their web operations look better at the expense of their newspapers. No wonder people think newspapers are failing. The truth is, the local newspaper and its website are a dynamite combination. Sell them that way.
• Stop tinkering with in-paper presentation. If the type is readable and the classifications are clear, readers will find and act on the ads. No amount of tweaking the color and headers and unpaid content will make a material difference in profitability.
• Promote. Promote. Promote. God should strike us down for cutting the classifieds promotion budget year after year. We got the results we paid for.

Lou Heldman is Distinguished Senior Fellow in Media Management and Journalism at Wichita State University. He is retired president and publisher of the Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com. You can reach him at lou.heldman@wichita.edu.