Since the ReinventingClassifieds.com blog has been a bit quiet lately, let’s catch up with some recent classifieds news and developments.

Place your own ads online: display, not just classifieds. As noted in Newspapers & Technology, the Orange County Register has developed an online create-your-own-ad system for display ads, which can be placed in the Register as well as 23 other community newspapers owned by the company. (These are targeted print publications delivered to Register subscribers as well as non-subscribing households.) The self-serve platform utilizes templates, where advertisers can select a design and supplied graphics — or upload their own — and type in their text. Assistance for advertisers trying to create their ads is available via e-mail, live online chat, and by phone. A direct link to the new display-advertising tool is at www.OCRegister.com/expressads.

Place-your-own-ad systems are, of course, increasingly commonplace at newspapers for classifieds. (FutureofNews.com, which underwrites this website, offers one widely used system, called PlaceMyAd.) But not everyone is on board even with that yet. Jim Townsend, editorial director of Classifieds Intelligence LLC, wrote a useful advice essay in the November issue of Newspapers & Technology, “Self-serve ad ordering: cash while you sleep,” in which he not only suggests that publishers not yet on the classifieds self-service bandwagon get on board now, but also offers an excellent list of tips. While these systems aren’t rocket science, they do take some thought and care to do it right. Townsend has some particularly useful advice on upsell strategies for online place-an-ad systems.

From PBS Mediashift: “Should Newspapers Become Online Ad Brokers for Local Businesses?.” An excellent article to get you thinking about expanding the reach of newspaper advertising. (We’ll have lots more to say here about this general concept, too, in the weeks ahead.)

Free ads for the unemployed. From Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp, “Tennessee Weekly Offers Free Classifieds to Unemployed.” The publisher of the Oneida Independent Herald has good intentions of helping people out during tough times, though he says that the free classified-ad offer will be for a limited time. Oneida is a rural community and the paper faces no threat yet from Craigslist free ads.

Bartering comes back. Here’s an interesting result of the economic downturn. More people facing tough personal financial troubles are turning to bartering. According to this Los Angeles Times story, economists say an increase in bartering is typical during recessions. Craigslist has a barter section (example), and there are several websites specific to bartering. Perhaps it’s time for newspaper classifieds managers to consider adding barter to their services.

3rd quarter was bad; 4th will be even worse. Newsosaur Alan Mutter has the low-down on the latest newspaper ad numbers. They ain’t pretty, of course. Citing the latest Newspaper Association of America statistics, Mutter notes that the industry overall earned $8.9 billion in print sales in the three months ended in September — down just under $2 billion from the same quarter a year ago. The worst categories? You guessed it: classifieds. According to the NAA: recruitment classified sales down 43.6% to $497.5 million; real estate down 38.6% to $629.3 million; and automotive down 29.2% to $563 million. The outlook for the final quarter of 2008 is, of course, even worse, as the effects of the financial crisis and tightening of the credit markets really kick in.

This Thursday, 50 newspaper company CEOs met in a closed-door “Crisis Summit” at the American Press Institute (Reston, Virginia). With no publicly available recordings of the proceedings, we don’t have much information, though API staff produced a written summary. Also, one of the participants, Gazette Communications CEO Chuck Peters, posted to Twitter through the day and invited outsiders to join the live online discussion.

Two corporate turnaround specialists guided the CEOs to understand where their companies are at along a crisis curve, and made these recommendations (as reported by the API staff):

• Act like an entrepreneur; stop thinking first about why a new approach won’t work.
• Create a portfolio of initiatives; recognize that some will fail and kill those quickly.
• Don’t wait for every data point before taking action. “Ready, fire, aim” should be the operating principle.
• Use downsizing as a tool when necessary to achieve a larger strategy, not simply as a cost-cutting goal.
• Figure out how to leverage core competencies into new directions and new niches.
• Be honest with employees, and get ideas from those on the front lines.
• Don’t sit and cower and weep about your problems. Inspire.
• Collaborate with outside entities that can bring expertise or resources.
• Pay attention to, and leverage, the brand.

Don’t let the CEOs hog that advice. Those are great recommendations for anyone managing a challenged classifieds operation.

If you follow my personal blog you may have seen the diagrams below, but I think they deserve some extra notice for the classifieds and advertising professionals who look in on ReinventingClassifieds.com (and don’t see my more general media musings). They come from retired management consultant Frank Pecarich, who has been watching the newspaper industry’s struggles with incredulity. He writes:

“There is something terribly wrong with the management and executive decision making model for most newspapers. The correction process (action research model) calls for an appropriate management system response to an accurate critique of the management system or process. In the management literature as well as in my experience, it is clear that those organizations who fail to ‘correct course’ after receiving clear indications from the market to correct themselves, ultimately fail. This is happening almost daily as newspapers are cutting staff and in so doing, totally curbing their capability to produce a quality product and thereby even have a chance to survive. The result is an ever deepening and ever tightening death spiral.”

Pecarich first shows with this diagram what a change-resistant organization looks like.

This probably is a good graphic representation of not just many newspaper companies, but also specifically their classifieds operations. External pressures continue slowly mounting and chipping away at the business while that catastrophic change-radically-now-or-die point is somewhere in the future.

Now here’s what you want to look like, says Pecarich:

The situation looks so much more manageable when companies respond to each significant change in the environment within a reasonable time frame, versus letting multiple warning signals mount until the situation is so dire that it’s insurmountable.

Can you get your company onto this rational change progression?

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 has a chance against the Craigslist juggernaut is to break down the walls. So an important component of the start-up’s strategy is to use iList to push ads out to social networks that people who place classified ads use.

What iList is doing is “the complete opposite of the walled garden” as represented by Craigslist (and many newspaper classifieds websites), says Abad.

His company has created a stand-alone classifieds site where anyone can place a free ad. But the service also allows you to push your ad out to people who are your friends or who follow you on these social networks:

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pownce
• Friendfeed

iList also lets you post the ad you create directly to Craigslist. (However, an ad I created was immediately flagged for removal on Craigslist, so I’m not sure if Craig & Co. are necessarily supportive of external sites posting to Craigslist sites yet. Abad says he is aware of the problems, which often are the result of zealous Craigslist users flagging ads they perceive as violating Craigslist’s rules, but he expects Craigslist to soon accept legitimate ads even when placed via other services such as iList.)

Abad’s mission is no less than “to reinvent classifieds,” he says — a mission very much in line with our thinking here at ReinventingClassifieds.com, of course. And he sees the future of classified advertising as very much open. Pushing ads out to social network friends lists and followers is the start.

Can iList really compete against Craigslist, with its legions of devoted users and fans? Abad thinks that Craigslist is ripe to be displaced because it has failed to innovate. While many people love the Craigslist brand and the ethos it represents, he believes that what most people will flock to are the services that work best for them and provide the best utility.

A weakness in the Craigslist model, Abad believes, is that it allows anonymity by sellers. iList is focused more on identity, so that a potential buyer can learn a bit about the seller, for example by exploring the seller’s social network presences and perhaps getting a sense of his or her trustworthiness.

Another Craigslist weakness: Searching can be difficult because the ads are unstructured. Abad favors the approach of collecting data for ads in very structured ways, such as having the advertiser place the number of bedrooms and bathrooms in a house for rent in specific fields rather than in an unstructured body text field. Ergo, search utility goes up.

The beyond-the-walled-garden concept that iList is championing represents the future, I believe. Advertisers want their messages spread around and not kept to just one website. And people within your personal social networks are a great target audience when you have something you wish to sell. (However, geographic filtering would be nice, since my Facebook friends who live outside Colorado couldn’t care less about the bicycle I have for sale, for example.)

iList also has an open classifieds platform for developers to build their own web applications around iList data. The company hopes to do business with other companies, and any developer can build web applications around iList data, says Abad, adding that “data portability is one of our core values.”

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 and content side of the paper. Classifieds? Nothing new to announce.

I have to wonder sometimes when I see newspaper print redesigns unleashed: Have you given up on classifieds in print? Why wouldn’t you put your ace design team on the job to redesign and reinvigorate the printed classifieds section, as well as the rest of the paper?

Something’s wrong when a newspaper company embarks on a large redesign project and neglects the vital revenue source that is failing fast and that most needs reinvention: classifieds.

Here’s today’s newly designed front page, alongside today’s Classifieds front. (Click for larger views.)

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, he urges.

Check out his blog post, “Advertising plunge will kill newspapers — and there won’t be a bailout.” Here are some excerpts:

“The focus should no longer be about the details, but instead about the big picture: The loss of advertising dollars. This is the immediate problem journalism faces. The bread and butter revenue stream is about to hit new lows and there is no solution to replace that money right now. Forget everything else. This should be priority number one. …

“Newspapers won’t be around long enough to reinvent news, right now they need to reinvent how to make money — and here’s a hint in case you haven’t gotten it yet: advertising-only revenue streams aren’t the answer.

“If you’re looking to change the news business, then start thinking about how to find new ways to make money from content or paid services that haven’t been done before in newspapers.

“No longer does ‘building cool shit’ count as worthwhile. The focus should be on ‘building cool revenue streams.’ …

“Innovation is a great thing, but right now you’re only draining one of your newspaper’s precious resources — your time — if it’s not helping keep the company ledger out of the red ink.”

Does he have a persuasive argument? How can newspaper ad departments get the reinvention/innovation forces with their organizations focused on ad and business-model innovation projects?

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 Intel newsletter for AR&D along with fellow media guru Terry Heaton, has written an important (but brief) piece on this topic: “Link To Other Sites, Already!.”

While Safran is generally offering advice to overall media operations (especially TV, where he and Heaton devote much of their energy), and especially editorial content, his comments can apply just as well to classifieds. Here are a few excerpts. (But read the whole thing.)

“One of the most difficult concepts to get our heads around is this: to keep people, we need to send them away. The Web is about links. We have written for years about the importance of linking to other sites. It’s good for the audience, it’s good for your Google ranking, it’s good Karma — and it’s good for your business. …

“The Web links. What makes us think we’re special? Do we really know something every other site doesn’t? No. The superstition is built upon old … notions of forbidding so much as a mention of the competition. …

“The bottom line is that, if we’re a great place to start, people will always come back. You want to be the starting point. Remember ‘The Miracle on 34th Street’: When Macy’s didn’t have it, Santa sent them to Gimbels. …

“The Web is linked and social. I didn’t see (a particular) Times article by reading the Times online. I saw it because (NYT writer Brian) Stelter is a friend of mine on Facebook, and he posted his article. Facebook works because it attracts you and it sends you elsewhere. Seems to be working OK for Facebook, doesn’t it? …

“Link out and others will link in.”

The linking ethos of the Web can apply to classifieds, too. Think different.

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 DC.

Details are here, along with Craigslist user commentary on the move. Predictably, there’s plenty of outcry mixed with support for the move, which is designed to rid the jobs area of those Craigslist sites of scammers, spammers, and abuse.

As always, Craigslist portrays the move as designed to improve the quality of the service, not to make more money for itself. As explained in the note to users: “We have received a lot of feedback over the last couple months, which has generally run in favor of a $25 per ad fee for posting jobs in these eight cities.”

The fee applies only to job postings, while the “Gigs” categories will remain free; those are for posting “smaller projects, odd jobs, low budget film gigs, openings for personal attendants, etc.”

For newspapers and other classifieds publishers in those 8 new cities, this probably means more downward price pressure on paid recruitment ads. When a city’s Craigslist job listings have been filled with lots of junk, a newspaper can tout the quality of the recruitment-advertising experience and (perhaps) get away with charging higher fees. With an improved Craigslist job section, publishers in those 8 cities now need to re-evaluate their pricing if they expect to be competitive.

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 in being an intelligent filter to all that is on the web.

As Brian Stelter wrote in the New York Times yesterday, linking out has finally reached bona fide media trend status. “Embracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors — acting in effect like aggregators,” he writes.

Should this apply to classifieds, too? I think so, especially for newspapers that have seen their classifieds revenues plummet and their number of ads shrink alarmingly. As newspapers’ print editions and websites become less valuable as a result of this decline, it’s time to do something to move the value needle upward again.

Example: Many recruitment classified ads for unskilled jobs have moved to sites like Craigslist. For a newspaper website that is no longer the dominant source of those types of job listings, it can make sense to point to employment ads on other sites. If the reader doesn’t find what he’s looking for within the newspaper listings, then suggest additional sources.

Of course, publishers can incorporate external classifieds from other sites via relationships with aggregators like Oodle. Participating in classifieds networks like Kaango can bring ads from other network partners (though the breadth of ad sources is smaller than Oodle’s). It’s a strategy clearly worth exploring at this point.

A simpler method (though with less financial potential): Provide links to other sites with additional ads. For instance, at the end of a list of accounting job listings from your site, provide links to that section of the local Craigslist, or relevant job listings of other newspaper sites in nearby communities, or online job listings on websites of local accounting firms, etc.

The news side has made the leap to link journalism. Do you think it’s time for the classifieds side of newspaper companies to follow?

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 wanting someone to come up with this application for the new generation of location-aware mobile smart phones:

An app that finds garage sales near your current location, then maps them on your phone and gives you driving directions. (And of course it takes into account the hours of the sales.)

Imagine garage-sale aficionados driving around on Saturday morning using only a phone to navigate from sale to sale. Not even a map required.

In theory, this shouldn’t be too difficult to create (for some smart mobile application developer). But it means that online venues that accept garage-sale ads need to get smarter about the formats that they accept those ads in, with users entering information like address (geo-tagging), date, times, and items for sale in data fields rather than writing everything in a single text field.

Newspapers could have an advantage in this by providing such a valuable service to the fast-growing number of users of location-aware mobile phones (Apple’s iPhone 3G, the brand new Gphone, et al). Of course, anyone could develop such an app, utilizing garage-sale ads from a variety of online classifieds sites, so it’s yet another test to see if newspaper publishers will (maybe this time?) do it first.

These days Craigslist is a pretty big source of garage-sale ads, but the ads are unstructured and would be tricky (perhaps impossible) to filter automatically (example).

Newspapers’ websites could become a better venue to place your garage sale ad by offering cutting-edge features like this. And since Craigslist continues its reticence to develop new features or change its dated interface, this is one (admittedly small) category to perhaps grab back from Craig and company.

Revenue model? Free basic online ads with various upsells, including being included in the mobile garage sale phone application.

OK, so who is going to take this on?

And this is just one little mobile classifieds idea. What other applications can we devise for mixing classifieds and our increasingly intelligent mobile phones? Please discuss…