You might find my latest column for Editor & Publisher Online of interest: “Print Classifieds for the Internet Age.”

It’s a look at a new trend among (a still small number of) newspapers to turn their printed classifieds into something completely different by not only redesigning the ad component, but turning the sections into credible editorial destinations for readers.

I’ve examined the St. Petersburg Times’ BayLink section, introduced last May, and the Baltimore Sun’s brand new FindIt! recruitment section introduced just a week ago along with the paper’s overall “reinvention”/redesign.

Let’s talk printed classifieds for a bit, and specifically design. Here’s an issue worth pondering:

Given that newspaper print-edition readers are aging (average age is now north of 50), is it time to increase the type size of classified liners to accommodate the deteriorating vision that we all get as we grow older?

Bad: narrow columns, centered text = hard to read   Improved: good font choice, wider column, good use of bold headings = readable

And if the answer is yes, will financially strapped publishers approve an extra point in type size, knowing that it will take up more newsprint?

My guess is that most newspaper publishers will not be willing to pay for that extra newsprint at a time when the business is struggling mightily. So I consulted with typography guru Jim Parkinson, who has worked for newspapers and magazines for several decades (you’ve seen plenty of his work but may not realize it; Parkinson designed such famous nameplates as Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, etc.), and asked him how to deal with this issue of aging readers and hard-to-read classifieds type.

Actually, Parkinson, who is 66 himself, doesn’t think it’s necessary to increase liner point size for most papers. Rather, he says, select the proper type with good readability characteristics, and implement some smart design changes, and you should be able to produce a classifieds section that works well even for aging newspaper print-edition readers.

Jim Parkinson

Among Parkinson’s recommendations:

• Select a font with a large “x-height” and smaller ascenders and descenders. X-height is the height of, for example, the letter “x”. Ascenders are the parts of a letter that go above the x-height, such as the upper part of the letter “d”. Descenders go below, such as the bottom part of the letter “y”. This can make small type size fairly readable. Ergo, no additional costs for newsprint.
• Redesign the classifieds section with design in mind; get past the historical industry practice of figuring out how to fit more and more ads into smaller amounts of space. Now that printed classifieds sections are smaller, it’s time to do some serious design work. They’ve got to look good now. In the past you could get away with poor (or no) design. Because more and more people are abandoning print classifieds in favor of online alternatives, an effort must be made to make print classifieds more appealing and useful.
• Look to other sections of the paper and carry over some of the design elements, look and feel to classifieds. Get serious about design, readability and usability.
• Widen column width for liner sections. The most common newspaper classifieds layout is 10 columns, which presents as a hard-to-read mess of a page. Wider columns (say, 6-column format) are easier for the eye to absorb efficiently.
• Be smart about using section headers that are easy to scan, and use bold headings intelligently to help readers scan a page for what they’re seeking.

I’ll have more detailed advice from Parkinson (and other designers) in a white paper I’m currently working on about How to Redesign Your Print Classifieds section. Watch for an announcement here soon.

Long-time newspaper journalist turned interactive media expert Joe Michaud recently left his post as president of MaineToday.com (part of the Portland Press-Herald in Maine) and joined the AIM Group/Classified Intelligence as senior analyst. Now that he’s settled into his home office outside Portland to work for AIM and consult for several New England newspaper clients, I had a chance today to catch up with him and pick his brain a bit about newspaper classifieds strategy. Here’s a tidbit…

What’s a smart strategy reflecting newspapers’ current (dour) situation? I asked. Answer: Rethink the printed classifieds section and treat it more like a “catalog.”

Here’s what he means: Online is clearly the best medium for classifieds in many respects, and if you’re a consumer searching for something specific, the web is the most efficient way to go. Print is not going to match online when it comes to utility. So in designing a printed classifieds section that makes sense for the times, it’s not going to work to try to compete directly with online classifieds.

Michaud favors the model of treating print classifieds in the same way as some retailers treat their catalogs. For example, L.L. Bean sends out printed catalogs in the mail, but they don’t include every product that the giant mail-order house carries. The catalogs include selected products, sometimes based on a theme (women’s fall clothing, kids back-to-school clothes, etc.), while clothing buyers would use the LLBean.com website to look up any item offered by the company.

What ultimately needs to happen, Michaud suggests, is that online is the repository of all classified ads; every advertiser coming through a newspaper ad ordering process is added to the website. Other channels, including print and mobile, may be paid upsells (or included in specific packages), so not every ad ends up in the printed classifieds section.

The key thinking behind this sort of strategy is recognition that the web (and in time, mobile) is how consumers now and in the future search for things they’re looking for (job, home, car, bicycle…). Print, as the catalog publishers have discovered, is best for creating enjoyable, browsable guides to shopping.

What is print best at? That, says Michaud, is the question newspaper publishers must ask themselves. The typical printed newspaper classified section isn’t very good when it comes to serving someone who is searching for something specific; the still-used narrow vertical column is not browsed easily or comfortably. Taking a “catalog”-like approach, you would redesign the section to make it a better browsing experience — and do a good job of guiding people to your website for expanded listings and the full ad inventory.

What do you think of this approach to reinventing printed classifieds?

Thanks to Henry Pollson for his comment here pointing out an article of interest to anyone who has to compete against Craigslist in their local market:

“Angie’s List: A better alternative to Craiglist for finding local contractors.”

Writer Henry Grimes points out his experience with finding local contractors to do work around his house. When he used Craigslist, he found that the people who placed ads there offering their services sometimes were unreliable.

However, using Angie’s List, he’s found excellent contractors. The difference: Angie’s List offers user ratings of contractors, while Craigslist just runs their ads.

Here’s Grimes’ description of Angie’s List:

“Angie’s List is similar to Craigslist, in that it’s a long-standing site (it was launched back in 1995) that has local listings for over 140 US cities and metro areas. Unlike Craigslist though, Angie’s List has ratings and reviews, and the site focuses exclusively on contractors and local service providers. It’s a far superior way to find high quality contractors.

“The downside of Angie’s List, however, is that you have to pay to access its listings. Membership costs $6.95 per month, or $53 per year, plus a $10 per month initial sign-up fee. … The way I look at it, though, compared to the hundreds if not thousands of dollars you’ll be investing with your contractor, an Angie’s List subscription fee is a small price to pay.

So here’s an example of a niche within classifieds (Services Offered) where Craigslist is vulnerable. It is certainly possible to create services that are better than Craigslist. Craigslist definitely has deficiencies, so look for them and try to create something much better that addresses them.

Now, Angie’s list is well established, so a local newspaper wanting to do a better job with community and customer ratings of local businesses and services will have to go up against it. Or reach out to Angie to explore a partnership.

I’m working on a white paper / report about how to redesign print classifieds sections for the modern world. (I’ll keep you posted on my progress and when it might be available.) And I have to say: It’s disturbing how slowly that’s happening, especially at U.S. newspapers.

If you look around at newspaper classifieds sections, most of them still look like they did in the 1960s. While page widths may have gotten narrower over the years to save paper, most classifieds are still in narrow vertical columns and not easily readable or designed with usability in mind.

For example, here’s a screen grab of a classifieds section page from the Dallas Morning News.

Yep, that’s what I remember classifieds looking like in the 1960s, when I was a kid. I could show you hundreds of other newspaper classifieds sections that look just like this.

Of course, there’s innovation out there, but my research is revealing that it’s not nearly enough. But at least some folks are trying to modernize paper classifieds. The Chicago Tribune has done some interesting work; the Baltimore Sun is reinventing its ink-on-paper classifieds. And the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times is being innovative; here’s a screen grab of what its classifieds front page looks like now:

While much of the emphasis these days is on online classifieds, newspapers need to pay attention to both online and print, making each the best possible in order to perform in what is now a hyper-competitive environment. I hope to have some great advice for you on the print side soon.

Meanwhile, if your newspaper is doing innovative work with print classifieds, I’d like to talk to you about it. Please e-mail me. Thanks!

With newspapers in deep trouble, it’s unlikely that they can climb out of their holes by themselves (especially as the holes keep getting deeper). If a solution or solutions are to be found, it will be in concert with other companies.

Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt is worried about the state of investigative reporting. Text version of Schmidt’s comments

One big opportunity may be in working with Google. Yes, the search giant that some publishers blame for their troubles also, just maybe, could be a newpaper savior. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is aware of and concerned about newspapers’ plight. He worries about the loss of investigative journalism as newspapers decline. Check out the video at right (from AdAge.com) of a recent talk by Schmidt to see what I mean.

Schmidt also has said publicly that he believes Google has a “moral imperative” to help newspapers figure out a new advertising model that will support their journalism. But how?

This page contains, below, an Open Letter to Google suggesting ways that the most successful company on the planet right now can help the newspaper industry. It’s a wiki, and we want YOU — readers of ReinventingClassifieds.com — to help write the letter. Add your ideas; edit or improve what others have written.

When the letter seems like it’s ready, well send it off to Google’s management team. So, what suggestions do you have for Google to come to the aid of newspapers, especially pertaining to classifieds strategies?

(Instructions: You can edit text in the large field below. When finished, include your name so we can see who has contributed, then click Update. To see a log of what’s been changed and by whom, look here. If you spot an abuse, you can fix it yourself, or alert me.)

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 about it recently.

Here’s his description of the project:

“Printcasting will allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication. The Printcasting model then will guide users through placing articles, photos and ads onto a template that either could be delivered by e-mail or printed at home and distributed. For example, a publication for reef-diving photographers could include ads for nearby dive shops or underwater cameras. The idea is to pair localized ads and content to create targeted publications.”

Pacheco says that he and his team are still thinking through the advertising components of Printcasting now, but he describes their thought process thus far as building “sort of a hybrid between self-serve classifieds and larger print display ad system.”

So how this might work for, say, a local auto repair shop, is that it would be able to create its own publication, and choose to include feeds of automotive news. Ads that others want targeted to the auto sector would show up in the shop’s little publication — along with many other Printcasting-powered publications on the topic of autos. (Publishers of these micro-publications receive a share of the ad revenues.)

The auto shop would get a widget to put on its website, which would feature new content posted to the shop’s blog. (That content can be included in the publication.) The widget would be the way that website viewers print out the auto shop’s publication or view it on-screen (PDF format).

Next, the auto shop owner could add “Advertiser” to his profile, which would allow him to create simple ads, which could be inserted not only into his own publication (possibly), but other auto-related publications by other Printcasting users, according to Pacheco.

Such ads are expected to be a good deal for advertisers. “We’re ultimately planning on tying the ad pricing to the number of downloads of the PDFs (download being a proxy for circulation),” Pacheco explains. “So the store-publisher’s ad cost would be proportional to how big their real distribution is.

“Advertisers will do this because it will be so damned easy and affordable since they only pay for a target audience. In this way, we hope the ‘long tail’ businesses who can never afford to buy ads in the daily newspaper that reach the 100 people who want their stuff along with the 70,000 who don’t want it will be able to advertise in some fashion. Today they basically check out unless there’s a niche publication we produce that matches their target.”

While what was just described may not sound like a traditional “classified ad,” Pacheco asks: “What’s the real difference between what I just described and a classified? And what’s the real difference between that and a display ad? It’s a hybrid of both, but way better because of the targeted delivery.”

Pacheco also thinks that RSS feeds for classifieds may be able to be incorporated into this model, but he won’t guarantee at this point that this will make it into the Printcasting launch. And he points out that this could be a nice upsell to a newspaper classifieds customer; they’d pay to additionally get their ad in a large number of Printcasting-powered niche publications. For example: “I’ve placed my ad for my car, sofa, rental, whatever and I’m told that for $20 I can have my ad show up in 5 other niche publications that have the kind of people I think may want my stuff.”

Because the Printcasting initiative is foundation-funded, the outcome at the end of the 2-year development cycle will be open source. The development process also is transparent, so other publishers can learn from what Pacheco and team are doing.

Keep an eye on it. Printcasting looks to be a promising model for advertising to the Long Tail.

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 better.

Does that leave an opening for someone to create a Better Craigslist, by doing a better job with technology and features?

Because Craigslist has been complacent for so long in terms of innovation (you can’t even post video classifieds there), some entrepreneurs believe that it’s vulnerable. And while Craig’s loyal following may not be ready to replace his list with something technologically better, building a Better Craigslist might lure enough of them away — or grab duplicate ad placements by Craigslist users wanting more exposure — to build a decent business.

So believe the founders of Texas-based Jicka.com, a Better Craigslist currently in beta and only now starting to emerge from under the radar. If you look at the site, I think you’ll have the same reaction as I did at first viewing: “Oh, they’re copying Craigslist.”

Click image to go to Jicka.com.

(Of course, they’re not the only ones. The biggest free-classifieds Craigslist competitor is Kijiji.com, which is owned by eBay, which also owns a chunk of Craigslist.)

Jicka co-founder Craig Agranoff, who lives in Florida, readily admits that he and his business partner (who is staying under the radar for now) studied Craigslist in order to design Jicka. He’s looked for all the things that could be added to make Craigslist better, and put them on a list to be created for his site. Some examples:

• All categories are free to place ads on Jicka. (Craigslist has a very small number of categories that charge a fee — and only in a few large cities.)
• You can post an ad in up to three cities that are within 60 miles of each other. (Inability to do this is a problem for advertisers wanting to cover multiple communities in some Craigslist cities. And you’re not supposed to post duplicate ads in multiple cities.)
• You will be able to pay an upsell fee in order to move your ad back up to the top. For something like a $1 fee (that’s not a firm amount), an apartment advertiser, for example, will be able to have the system move his ad back to the top of the category at a scheduled time. (On some Craigslist sites, new ads move in so quickly that your ad can get buried in a short time; and the sites prohibit multiple postings of the same ads.)
• A notification system will allow buyers to subscribe to fine-tuned alerts when new items matching their criteria come on to a Jicka site. For example, you’ll be able to watch for blue Saab convertibles in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
• Advertisers will be able to post video, as well as photos and text. (Craigslist doesn’t yet support video.)
• User profiles will allow sellers and buyers to share information about themselves, which can serve to ensure more trust by users when making a transaction. It’s akin to going on eBay and learning about a buyer before making a bid. (Craigslist has no such public profiles.)
• Each category will have a featured item, which will be determined by a bidding system; highest bidder gets the slot. Ergo, it’s another revenue source for Jicka, and a way for advertisers to pay to be featured prominently within a category. (Craigslist has nothing like this yet.)

There’s one other key feature, not offered by Craigslist, that Agranoff believes will entice people to advertise on Jicka.com, and it’s a key part of the plan to attract classified advertising in an online world dominated by Craigslist: free limited warranties.

By placing a free ad on Jicka.com, an advertiser will get a free warranty for a trial period. Home sellers get a 6-month limited home warranty. Auto sellers get a 30-day limited warranty. (That is, the buyer gets the warranty when they purchase something advertised on Jicka.com.) Anyone placing an ad of any kind gets a 1-year identity protection plan.

That’s an interesting strategy. It’s like, giving away free ads isn’t enough anymore; now you have to offer “better than free.”

Of course, that’s a marketing strategy by companies that offer warranties — which will pick up new customers when some of the Jicka advertisers renew after the free trial period — and it doesn’t cost Jicka anything.

Agranoff says he and his partner are considering various marketing strategies to get Jicka.com some attention, one of which is a direct-mail campaign touting the site and the free trial warranty offers.

The company, which is self-funded by the founders and has no outside investors at this point, seems to be focused on low-cost ways to develop the business. Another helpful strategy: outsourcing web development and programming to India, where costs are significantly lower than hiring U.S. developers.

Frankly, going up against Craigslist with a network of city sites that are directly competitive with Craigslist is going to be really tough. Craigslist has almost a psychological hold on many people who use it. Not only is it effective (and I know that from personal experience), but the company has fostered an image that they are good guys out not to make a buck but to help people get good deals and sell their stuff.

But I do think Jicka has a chance by doing some things that Craigslist is ignoring because they (apparently) don’t think they need to. For instance, Agranoff says his company is developing a Jicka application for Facebook, as well as for the iPhone. Craigslist doesn’t have a mobile edition, but Jicka will soon. That kind of innovation in the face of Craigslist’s conservative approach to changing its sites could build a base of users that sustains a viable business.

Also, Agranoff says that he’s willing to enter into relationships with publishers and other entities, where Craigslist remains averse to that.

I’ll make no predictions about Jicka (or Kijiji) catching up to Craigslist, however. In the free classifieds space, Craig has a huge lead. But Craig & Co. have left the door open by choosing not to take part in the technological arms race.

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 Mexican newspaper El Universal, which also publishes four other, separately branded online verticals.

Take a look at the new interface (click image to go to the website), compared to the original which follows. Mousing over one of the colored category blocks expands the box down to show more fields; in this image the red category (autos) has been expanded.

Obviously, the site’s main page is much more Google-like in its simplicity. The old design — which is fairly typical of newspaper classifieds homepages — is complicated and confusing. Jacobson believes that such cluttered design hinders users, and is part of the reason that alternatives like Craigslist are favored by many online users.

Jacobson describes the thinking behind the redesign in a comment elsewhere on this website. There he notes that such changes are harder to make at US newspaper websites:

“These changes may seem elementary, but we’ve found that even simple changes to improve usability are difficult or impossible to make at papers in the US. That’s one reason why users prefer Craigslist — it’s easier to use than newspaper sites.”

What do you think? Is there merit in “Google-izing” online classifieds sections?

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 DID!

There was probably some smart classified manager out there, several years ago, with an idea much like Craigslist but the publisher or the parent company would not invest because it was not in the budget. Now they are budgeting for less of a return on the dollar, or cutting the quality of their product to make sure they do get the same return.

This industry needs to fund a central developmental organization to promote the current products and develop, not just new twists, but new innovations. Waiting for the next threat, and reacting with some wimpy promotion is NOT a plan!

If you ride a dead horse long enough you will eventually be forced to dismount.