Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting initiative, for which he and the Bakersfield Californian got a Knight Foundation grant to fund for a 2-year development cycle, is worth paying attention to if you’re in the classifieds business. While not a classifieds project, per se, Printcasting does have some implications for classifieds, which I learned when I asked Pacheco […]

While Craigslist is the 800-pound gorilla of free classifieds (well, mostly free), it’s far from perfect. Even its top executives admit that the site is not on the cutting edge of web technology. While Craigslist does respond to user needs and some requests, there are plenty of features that could be added to make it […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]