Couldn’t be written any better. Reading this post reminds me of my old room

mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this article to him.

Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thanks for sharing!

Your essay has many good points, but the ones that deeply resonated with me were those on our legacy systems and reliance on vendors who served our supposed needs for a locked-down product.

As chair of the NAA's Systems Committee, this was a glaring problem to us over 2 years ago. Getting traction in the newspaper industry to solve this problem has been much harder.

At least some small group of media companies has to join together to support a solution.

We are trying to implement many of your concepts in our C3 -Complete Community Connection effort. We track our progress at http://cpetersia.wordpress.com

We have focused on concepts, attitudes, tasks, organization and projects. As we accelerate our progress this year, we are going to need all the help we can get.

Thanks for sharing.

Chuck

I think a large portion of the issue, also, is ADVERTISERS not thinking beyond the local geography. If your wife were concerned with only selling her books to people that could physically walk to your apartment to perchase them, she’d make significantly less money. Instead, she’s willing to take a portion of her total sell price for shipping to ensure that her item sells. Most of the small businesses that are successful in Fargo are willing to work the Net into their business model.

The problem arises when the product is too large for a global market. Like cars and houses… longtime bastions of local papers’ adertising dollars, as you mentioned. No one is going to drive to Denver to get the car they want when they can go to their local dealer and order the same car. So maybe, rather than focusing on those areas because they’re so lucrative, papers should focus on those products which, while being locally available and pervasive, are still easily portable, and therefore more prone to a quick turnaround.

Sure, papers (et al.) are capable of creating a market for an item, when doing something as passive as classifieds, you’re not serving anyone by limiting advertisers to a market that may not even contain a potential customer. And I don’t think advertisers are realizing that, either. Some businesses are limited by their geography, but I imagine a greater number of them could use the internet for all aspects of their business than already do. Law firms, ad agencies, grocers, hotels, art galleries, hundreds of retailers and service industry businesses limit THEMSELVES by only looking at the local options. It’s like the joke from when The Critic went online: “Brought to you by Parsley.com; the web’s first person-to-person parsley provider.” It may have been a throwaway joke, but I think it was vastly more precient than advertisers are willing to give creedence to.

I’m not suggesting every brick-and-mortar business go and make another early 90s dot-com push, but I’m suggesting they look outside the local focus they have, and therefore change the focus of their advertisers’ efforts. If the paper gets enough requests for advertising outside the local market, then either they change to SERVE THEIR CUSTOMERS, or they lose business to Google Ads, Craigslist, et al.

I now realize a sizeable portion of this is a repetition of your own points, but the main thrust of mine is that it isn’t solely a provider’s issue. If a business is willing to widen their scope, then a provider must be willing to do the same or die. So the revolution (in a manner of speaking) needs to happen a step lower than the paper.

While a large number of small businesses (at least, retail businesses) are using outlets like eBay, Amazon, Google, and Craislist, many retailers and entrepeneurs, I suspect, ignore them because they think they can’t do any better than their local paper. And everyone is getting screwed by that line of thinking. Advertisers think they don’t need to do better, papers think they don’t need to do better, and everyone gets confused because their “good enough” business model isn’t, in fact, good enough. The hallmark of good, sustainable business practice is the ability to adapt to a changing market. And that goes for advertisers as much, or more, than providers.