Are CAMs too sensitive to hear radical change ideas?

I had an interesting e-mail exchange today with someone who follows ReinventingClassifieds.com. He objected to some of the ideas that were presented by Tim Windsor as being too radical, too crazy to be taken seriously. And he warned me that by presenting ideas that are too “out there,” newspaper classified advertising managers might decide not to take this entire website seriously.

The blog item posted here yesterday linked to Windsor’s entry on his own blog, titled “A big job: reinventing classifieds.” We grabbed a few highlights from Windsor’s post and published them, including this:

“Get out of print. … Convert to 100% digital classifieds now and use the paper to promote the heck out of the online product. This will cost in the short run, but so will doing nothing.”

My e-mail correspondent and I had different readings of Windsor’s advice. He took it literally as a call to stop printing classifieds in print and purely use print to promote a newspaper’s online classifieds services — and therefore it was a dangerous and crazy statement. I felt that in totality, the advice was more about redesigning and reinventing printed newspaper classifieds to better drive consumers to the online services, where future growth will be as printed newspaper classifieds continue to wind down, and using print for the type of ads that make the most sense for that medium. (I believe there’s plenty of life left with print classifieds, but they do need to be revamped in a way that has yet to be achieved. I’m working on a white paper on exactly that topic.)

ReinventingClassifieds.com is designed as a place to air ideas and debate them, in hopes of coming up with solutions that will turn the situation around for newspaper companies. We need solutions that halt the current cycle of sliding revenues and layoffs. Surely we can be open to all sorts of ideas, without worrying that ones that are too radical will close the minds of newspaper decision-makers.

Times are pretty desperate for the newspaper industry. I hope that rather than rejecting an ideas as “unworthy of a response,” CAMs will challenge them and add their own wisdom to this important conversation.