Newspapers should take what they know about their kryptonite and use it against each other. Remember Rule No. 1. “If newspapers are going to survive, first some must die.”
Maybe even more than most industries, newspapers spend time identifying and talking about our own weaknesses. And maybe there’s nothing we can do to fix them. But we can exploit the weakness of competing newspapers.
The market doesn’t need 1,000 sources for health news, or travel news, or movie reviews. In the old world, each newspaper had to cover these topics. If they didn’t, who else would? Problem is that online newspapers compete amid a national market.
Classifieds demonstrates how this new playing field changes our reality and exposes a weakness. The market doesn’t want 1,000 places for classifieds. Consumers can comprehend only a handful of sources.
Maybe that means your newspaper is going to lose its classifieds revenue. If it does, your newspaper is going to hurt financially. On the other side of that coin, though, the market for classifieds is going to expand rapidly for someone.
Be that someone.
Be the first to stop lamenting the opportunity new technology has to ruin our budgets and become that new technology.
Craigslist demonstrates that giving away classifieds for free is an effective way to soak up market penetration where there had been none. That should make you think about the competing news organizations at your territory borders.
Is there a newspaper one town over? There doesn’t need to be.
Start your own free classifieds Web site one town over. Later expand that same site two towns over. And then three. When you have a lock on the classifieds market, start news operations there with the user-submitted sites we’re all so worried about.
There will be only one jobs site for all of Florida, where I live. Newspapers are unwitting entrants in a race to win the title as this state’s Classifieds Web site.
Classifieds revenues are like meat and potatoes to newspaper beasts. But when classifieds are free, they’re less filling. The beast needs to eat much more food than it did before. And that means roaming.
Newspapers must expand their classifieds boundaries, just to stay alive. And in most cases that means eating a neighbor’s lunch.
