Another gun is being aimed at knocking down Craigslist, this time by an entrepreneur who sees the weak spot as Craigslist’s walled-garden approach to classifieds. San Francisco-based iList.com just recently popped out from under the radar, and founder Chris Abad thinks that the key to creating a competing network of free classifieds websites that actually [...]

You might have noticed that the Boston Globe introduced a new print-edition redesign today. There’s an extensive FAQ explaining all the changes, of which some are attempts to make the paper better (of course) and others are necessary cutbacks for the paper to survive in tough times. Alas, all the changes are to the editorial [...]

If you look at the innovation being tried at newspaper companies, most of it is on the editorial, content and technology sides. But according to Kyoshi Martinez, that’s not the right approach at this point in time, when newspapers’ business model is under attack and the industry is struggling. Concentrate on reinventing the ad model, [...]

The other day I posted some thoughts about growing an online classified service’s utility and usefulness to its customers and users by linking to other sources of ads. (Yes, to the old way of thinking about newspapers and classifieds, that’s heresy. Now it’s becoming a necessity.) Media consultant Steve Safran, who co-writes the Media 2.0 [...]

As of Wednesday (October 15), Craigslist will begin charging $25 for job postings in 8 new cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami (South Florida), Philadelphia, and Phoenix. The company previously has charged for job ads in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, Orange County, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington [...]

Something I’ve advocated for some time in my “other” job as digital-media blogger and Editor & Publisher Online columnist is for news websites to stop being online islands and provide links out to other sources of news, in addition to playing their traditional news role. Google has proven beyond a doubt that there’s much value [...]

Last week I got to sit down at lunch in Boulder and chat with David Herrold, online and mobile media expert for the Houston Chronicle (whose recent project has been spearheading the Chronicle’s transition to using Kaango for some of its classifieds). He mentioned a mobile idea that I too have pondered, and we’re both [...]

Recently I wrote a column for Editor & Publisher Online espousing the idea of enhancing classifieds sections in printed newspapers by turning them into high-quality editorial sections integrated with classified ads. (“Print Classifieds for the Internet Age.”) It profiled a couple of new attempts (St. Petersburg Times and Baltimore Sun) to have their printed classifieds [...]

In his (always must-read) blog, Newsosaur, media consultant and former newspaper executive Alan Mutter challenges the view that the poor economy is the crux of newspapers’ problems, as some industry executives are suggesting: “It’s not the stupid economy, newspapers.” Read his entire post, but here are a few excerpts: “Newspaper ad sales didn’t just go [...]