Can newspaper classifieds be saved?

Welcome to ReinventingClassifieds.com! This is a new website and initiative that has as its aim resurrecting and reinventing the newspaper classifieds business.

Is that an audacious goal? It feels that way. When I’ve mentioned this project to professional colleagues, the common response has been a sarcastic “Good luck with that!” If it’s an in-person meeting, the response is accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.

It seems that many people outside and inside the profession have given up on newspaper classifieds as ever being a growth business again. Everyone of course acknowledges that it’s still a massive, multi-billion-dollar business. But years of getting beat up by Internet upstarts, from small-but-powerful Craigslist to giant revenue-stealers like Monster.com, have put the newspaper industry in a defeatist mood. The expectation is that the future holds decline. The only question open to interpretation is how slow or fast?

In a recent column, online advertising guru and entrepreneur Dave Morgan (himself a newspaper industry veteran) pondered the future of digital marketing: “It occurred to me that there is another very big opportunity [available]: backfilling the impending collapse of a number of large media companies.” He (and a growing chorus of media experts) expects to see old media companies — including, especially, newspapers — collapse in the next four years, and new players move in to replace them with something more relevant to the times. Foundering classifieds revenues are a big part of the reason.

Morgan is a smart guy, and I think he is reading the tea leaves correctly. But that future assumes that the newspaper industry is unable to reinvent itself. I think that there is still hope, especially when it comes to classifieds. This is not a lost cause, IF the newspaper industry can truly reinvent the classifieds business model. Merely tweaking what currently exists isn’t enough.

How can newspapers do that? There’s no simple answer, but with this website we hope to explore the possibilities and present solutions that publishers can use to turn things around. So here on ReinventingClassifieds.com you’ll find in the weeks and months ahead:

• Reporting, analysis, and commentary by me and my partner in this project, Christopher Ryan of Future of News.
• Guest essays and editorials by industry experts who have ideas to share.
• Discussion and back and forth around the ideas and solutions presented.
• Occasional white papers and special reports.
• Regular surveys of classifieds professionals and newspaper decision-makers.
• Solutions offered by us, which are driven by the discussion, ideas, and feedback published on this website.

What is the general theme of the solutions we’re thinking about here on ReinventingClassifieds.com? This website is designed with the idea that we don’t have all the answers. But by utilizing the collective intelligence of people in the classifieds, publishing, and new media industries, we can discover them.

That said, this website is affiliated with Ryan’s company, Future of News, which is developing a platform and solution for use by newspaper publishers called AdEverywhere™. As its name implies, this particular solution to newspapers’ classifieds woes takes a distributed-web approach to the problem. One of the tenets of this initiative is that newspapers cannot afford to spend any more time as islands in the fragmented media environment that we now find ourselves in. Newspaper classifieds limited to a newspaper print edition and website — no matter how successful they may be and how powerful the company brand might still be — cannot succeed. They must be everywhere.

I hope you’ll join in the conversation here on ReinventingClassifieds.com. Help us find that light at the end of a tunnel that’s rather dark right now.

Tags: adeverywhere, reinventing classifieds