As baby boomers retire, a market to serve them is about to explode. And Journerdism points out a new site called BoomerGirl.com, which was created by LJWorld.com to answer the emerging trend.

The pluses. Most of the content seems on target. Sections address boomer women’s desire to keep learning and doing with information about joining clubs and traveling. The design challenges the status quo.

The minuses. BoomerGirl doesn’t do much to act as a tool for helping women help the world around them. The Oprah effect is basically ignored.

But the big problem is the name, BoomerGirl.com, which is strained to be fun and instead turns condescending. Women don’t appreciate being called girls. The editors say they knew that and chose the name anyway.

We ran the name by a LOT of women. The majority of them agreed that, in the context of this Web site - where we're clearly equals and "all in this together" — "girl" is a term of endearment and affection, as in a "it's a girl thing" or "night out with the girls."

The problem is that when a person first hears the name, they don’t have any context that might save it. The name is all they know. And they’re immediately insulted. Not a good first impression.

All of the marketing for the site will have to be spent convincing women to disregard the name. Look past the name, they'll say, it's got good content.

Wow, media columnist Jon Friedman sure can overreact. It’s been four months since Katie Couric debuted as anchor of CBS Evening News and he’s already calling for her removal.

“Couric's record says she is in third place,” he writes. “It's time for CBS to go to Plan B.”

Changing the face of the news doesn’t automatically mean people start watching it. There is no magical anchor who would have propelled CBS into first place. It’s been in third place for years. And years.

Using Friedman’s logic, ABC’s Charlie Gibson should be fired because his newscast didn’t shoot into first place. It means that most every anchor on cable news should be canned.

What’s worse is Friedman blames the Internet for creating an atmosphere that demands instant results.

While Couric attracted a big audience during the honeymoon period, that has long since ended. With the Internet speeding up the world, Couric's grace time wasn't destined to last very long, anyway.

Boy am I tired of people blaming the Internet for their own ADHD. Getting instant access to information shouldn’t mean we’re unable to make long-term plans, it should mean we make smarter long-term plans.

I’m not keen to every word spoken by Jim Buckmaster or Craig Newmark, but this is the first time I’ve heard either explicitly claim that users asked to be charged for ads in the seven markets where Craigslist does that.

During an interview with “practical ecommerce,” Newmark made the crazy assertion I’ve said they had recently only implied, that Craigslist users begged them to stop giving away ads for free and instead wanted to be charged.

“We charge people in markets where they have asked us to charge them,” Newmark said.

First of all, I can’t imagine anyone asking to be charged. Someone’s words are being twisted there. Or, many someones.

Second, everything Newmark says before that quote indicates he was looking for ways to make money so Craigslist had enough to stay in business.

The idea of revenues and income didn’t come along until, I guess, we decided to make the company into a real company, which was in early ‘99. The volunteer thing hadn’t worked, and some folks helped me get out of denial and get serious. That meant making it a real company . . . Mostly it was just a matter of revenue to pay the bills. We didn’t have a strategy, per se. We just continued offering good customer service and plugging away. We were still just serving San Francisco and the Bay area. Five or six years ago, when I talked to a lot of people about how to generate revenues, they told me to charge people who are otherwise paying more money for less effective ads (elsewhere). They also told me to charge job posters for help wanted ads, and we were told to charge for real estate ads. In practice, we charge for help wanted ads in seven cities and apartment rental ads only in New York. We charge people in markets where they have asked us to charge them.

So which is it?

Did Craigslist need money to pay the bills or did users just get fed up with all those free ads? Charge me, damn it!

A new poll reports that gay people are not only more likely to read your blog, we’re also more likely to use the Internet than straight people. Here’s how the numbers from Harris Interactive’s poll stack up:

- Indicated they read blogs:
Gay people: 40 percent. Straight people: 26 percent.

- Visit blogs daily:
Gay people: 36 percent. Straight people: 19 percent.

- Spend between 24 and 168 hours online per week for things other than e-mail:
Gay people: 32 percent. Straight people: 18 percent.

The lesson here? If you’re thinking about launching a new product, go for the gays. We’re more likely to try it.

And here’s a revealing side note. The Harris poll outed Friendster, which is apparently gay. The numbers:

- Use MySpace:
Gay people: 33 percent. Straight people: 28 percent

- Use Friendster:
Gay people: 11 percent. Straight people: 4 percent.

With the Star-Tribune selling for about half of its original value, you’d think folks at that newspaper would take a hard look in the mirror. Instead, they’re telling journalism fairy tales.

In this once-upon-a-time, the villain is usually wearing a nice suit and knows little about the newspaper people who he has come to plunder. And there’s a hero, who can save newspapers by summoning the power of “good journalism.”

The moral of the story is always: Invest in good journalism and magic just happens.

It’s like Santa Claus. Be good and you’ll get presents. Be bad and you get coal, or layoffs. Editors who listen to this story are taught it’s heroic to cocoon into their newsrooms and block out the influences of declining revenue and circulation numbers. Report more or edit cleaner and then, magically, world peace.

Journalism fairy tales make us feel better. But they’re also a big reason newspapers are falling apart.

Purveying the idea that simply investing in journalism cures all problems allows us to ignore the fact we’re working for a business.

The fairy tale also hints of nostalgia for days gone by. “Oh, remember the days when all we talked about was journalism and good writing. We were profitable then, so that must be what we have to do now.” Or so the thinking goes.

Here’s the version of our fairy tale that the Star-Tribune’s “reader representative” told in a column headlined, “Why good journalism is also smart business.”

Everyone has watched formerly great newspapers around the country weakened in short-term bids to appease Wall Street's and some private investors' insatiable desire for ever more profits.

Just last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer announced it was laying off 68 to 71 staffers . . . Will that now be the Star Tribune's fate? Or do these new owners have something else in mind for after the sale, likely to close in February? Could this be the market where someone finally figures out how to keep the quality of a profitable newspaper intact through a transition of some content and readers from print on paper to the Internet? . . .

Investors who generally gauge business health through profits may be surprised to discover how much evidence exists that financial success for newspapers is tied to investment in good journalism . . .

Researchers find more and more evidence that investment in newsroom staffs, budgets and space for news stories fuels credibility that attracts advertisers and readers . . .

At first blush, this labor-intensive, quality journalism may seem inefficient. It takes time and resources to produce that caliber of writing, reporting and online features.

But when that investment in journalism happens, the results very efficiently attract lots of readers' eyes -- something to warm the hearts of advertisers and circulation directors.

Only time will tell if this is a short-term flip of a newspaper property or whether something groundbreaking and smart is about to take place here in the Twin Cities. One thing is clear: The Avista folks strike me as anything but fools with their money. I'm betting on good journalism.

I was going to write a follow up to my previous entry about the claim that good journalism can save the newspaper industry. The post would have pointed out examples where newspapers doing good journalism still had bad business. But Howard Owens beat me to it, and he's got it right.

As we all know, Craigslist claims the reason it won’t sell banner ads is none of its users requested the ads. Well, actually, they have.

Professional marketers are waking up to the buying power of users on the free classifieds site. Now businesses are trying to sell real stuff on the site. But what they post is often flagged as spam, and isn’t accepted as a legit ad.

Businesses aren’t going to give up that easily, so many resort to “spamvertising” techniques. Here’s how clickz reported it in a recent article:

The free classifieds site has become a venue for small businesspeople and marketers hoping to reach them there. Enterprising coders have created software to automate Craigslist posts, and consultants have made a business of advising sellers how to market on the site.

"Over the last two years, there's been a huge influx of professional marketers" using Craigslist, said Shannon Lewis, director for police auction site PropertyRoom.com, and author of "The Unofficial Craigslist Book, Proven Ways to Market Almost Anything Using Craigslist.org."

"Craigslist turns your neighborhood furniture wholesaler into an aggressive marketer."

Professional advertisers are Craigslist users, regardless of however unwanted they might be by Mr. Newmark. Instead of posting spamvertising, these advertisers should be invited to post real banner ads.

Newmark claims he’s sooo receptive to customers but ignores this obvious demand from one large group of them. Continuing to ignore the request will only further detract from the user experience for everyone.

My last boss had an obsession with eBay. And it framed a lot of his thinking about how online news could evolve. For me, the obsession is Netflix. I love it. Everywhere I look on Netflix, I see a newspaper of tomorrow.

Too many services misunderstand user feedback. For example, just because 1,000 people said an article was good doesn’t mean it’s good for me.

Netflix recommends based on what you like, based on your own feedback. Honestly, that might not be exactly how it works according to the algorithm. But that’s how it’s marketed and how it works in my head.

For me, when I say, “Netflix your news,” I mean users give feedback about their interests and then let the system find articles that match those interests.

On every story, readers should be able to rank whether it was of interest. A five-star rating wouldn’t say the story was well written or from a trusted source, just that it was really interesting.

Systems from companies such as Teragram can automatically assign taxonomy keywords to stories based on the content. For example, a story written about a new restaurant to open downtown would automatically be assigned keywords like:

Geography >> Florida >> Sarasota >> Downtown
Arts & Entertainment >> Dining

Let’s say a murder takes place at that same restaurant. Well, the system would probably assign the same keywords as above plus one for murder.

Anyway, with all of these keywords being assigned to stories already, it lets us interpret what exactly a person enjoys reading. If Joe reads that first story about the new restaurant opening downtown, we can guesstimate that it means he might be interested in Downtown Sarasota and Dining. Maybe he gave the story a five-star Netflix rating.

But maybe he read the murder story and found it wasn’t of interest to him. Let’s say he gave the story only one star. From that we would average the scores for each of the story’s three keywords.

Downtown would be left with three stars. Dining would be left with three stars. But murder would get the one-star rating.

Rinse and repeat, as they say. Joe can keep surfing the site and ranking his interest in stories. Maybe he’ll read a lot of stories about Downtown Sarasota and rank all of them high, bringing up the star rating for that keyword.

Eventually we’d get a good picture of what Joe says he’s interested in reading. It’s like we become Joe’s friends, who knows what he likes, so we tell him about news we’ve heard that he’ll find interesting.

Pretty simple, really. But it’s a huge change for news.

For the most part, personalization on news Web sites has meant the reader picks a very general category and then those stories display somewhere on the home page. More often than not, a lot of stories in that very broad category still aren’t interesting, at least not to me.

Wired is letting users decide what trends will affect tech businesses in the coming year as it writes its Wired 40 list of top companies. And it's a lot of fun. Rate each trend or submit your own and watch as the crowd influences the outcome of the list. Here's the trend I submitted:

Consolidation of traditional media
As local newspapers and TV stations face declines in revenue, some fold. Others merge or buy out competitors. The result is far fewer mainstream media outlets as alternative media grow.

An article in The Times says the new wave of community sites is caused by local newspapers’ lack of micro-local coverage. That's true, but there's more to it.

Micro-local sites find solid footing because:

1) Newspapers create financial support for start-ups by setting ad rates too high for small business owners. Micro-sites become entry-level for advertisers. I've warned about this before.

2) Cash-strapped newspapers move too slowly to recognize emerging "long-tail" markets. Niche geographics are just another example of The Long Tail. Post the slightest, seemingly unimportant news, and it's still read by someone. Maybe a dozen someones. Point is, there are page views to be generated, and sold.

The Times article begs the question: If geographic niche sites are becoming increasingly common, then what happens to local newspapers?

Letting a geographic niche site grow under your feet is what the Innovator's Dilemma warned against. An effective low-end competitor pushes the original business to focus on the high-end market. For newspapers, that means focusing on large advertisers and rich readers. Inevitably, the formerly low-end competitor makes headway into the high-end market. And the original business slowly loses all market share. Read the book. This exact plot has unfolded many times, in many industries.

The good news for newspapers is they're willing to buy competitors.

When a newspaper awakens and sees a strong competitor in its midst, it will try to beat them or buy them. FresnoFamous.com is the perfect example of a geographic-niche site bought by a newspaper that got caught flat-footed in responding to an emerging market.

The trouble will come only if the community site refuses to sell.

And the award for worst poll of the day goes to:

Are you superstitious?
Yes or No

The name of the site posting that worthless poll question is being withheld because it would be unfair to single out just one offender. So many sites have this lazy polling problem. And it's just a huge pet peeve of mine.

Two clues that you're about to ask a lazy poll question:
1) The question is really short.
2) It could be asked on any day of the year.

Newspaper sites have posted polls for a long time now. News provides an endless stream of possible poll questions. No excuses.

The Washington Post reports that newspapers will increasingly be the target of private ownership because it provides a layer of protection from the ups and downs of Wall Street shareholders. Sound familiar?

It should. I said the very same thing exactly one month ago.

Here’s how The Post reports it:

In recent decades, almost all large newspapers and chains have been publicly owned. Now, however, newspapers have fallen into disfavor with Wall Street, which values stock-price growth over almost every performance metric. And newspapers are not growing.

Advertising growth exists only online, yet digital revenue is still less than 10 percent of almost every paper's total revenue. Consequently, public investors have forced companies to sell newspapers and break up venerable chains in an effort to extract value. The result: More papers are falling into private hands, where equity partnerships rule.

Though they are not growing, many newspapers continue to make healthy profits, making them appealing targets for equity firms: small groups of moneyed investors who typically hold their new companies for a few years, urge them to cut costs and create value, and then sell their interest and move on. Some equity firms leave the companies stronger and better-positioned for the future; others do not.

The Post moves this debate forward in an astute direction. Private equity firms are not known for buying anything and keeping it forever. They’re flippers, usually. So the question is when will they sell and to who? Check back tomorrow for the worst case scenario. You won’t want to miss it.

What happens if the sliding print revenues of 2006 become permanent or worsen?

The reality is that most newspaper companies are not prepared to make the switch from primarily print-focused to Web-focused. So if print revenue can no longer support the cost of doing business, odds are newspapers will stop doing business.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to happen. I know. Our executives have said for a long time that one day they’ll transfer the business online. But the opportunity is ending to move the business by our own will. Now the readers will do it for us.

Readers first started moving online in a trickle. It was like a small crack in a dam, leaking water. Then the crack got larger and people started moving online more quickly. What’s about to happen is that dam is so weak it’s going to break. Readership and revenues are going to move online in a rush.

Sadly, newspapers don’t have enough online infrastructure to catch the impending flood. If the dam breaks now, they will be largely passed by.

With not enough revenue from print, and not enough resources online to take advantage of the sudden market change, newspapers will slash expenses. As we know, the only expenses available to cut are people. No one has a plan (or has tried this one) for cutting the costs of printing. So newspapers will slash and slash until the product is so diluted that even reliable advertisers will try other things.

Then begins the transition. What’s really at stake is what happens during transition.

The plague will spread from newspaper company to newspaper company, which will each suddenly put themselves up for sale or sell off in pieces. Or just go bankrupt.

If newspapers die, then someone else will pick up the flag. The great risk is who picks up the flag. Because it won't come from within our own ranks.

The first cost of the worst-case scenario: Who buys the papers?

Get to know the likes of Yahoo and Comcast because they would enjoy being content providers. They’re not journalists and they don’t care about journalism. They care about money and market share first and foremost. Modern newspapers have benefited from the patience of owners who understand journalism and its importance to society. Don’t expect that from a corporate conglomerate.

And don’t expect the slashing to stop just because your newspaper is bought. Instead, cuts venture into areas never before thought possible.

Still, only a few foundering newspapers will be bought. Most will close.

The journalism vendors that depend on newspapers to make their money will be immediately and suddenly affected. Unable to react quickly enough, each of them will close shop. Think of your content management companies. Think of the AP.

If enough newspapers close down, the AP will scramble to re-emerge as an independent content provider. Before it can do that, if it can do that, the AP will have to cut its news coverage severely to compensate for lost revenue.

That’s the second big cost of the worst-case scenario: When newspapers die, there will be an immediate and large unmet demand for news.

So what won't get covered? That’s the immeasurable cost of all this. Failing financially now means failing the country later.

The founders built the check and balance of the press for a reason. Without it, politicians can spend and legislate with fewer investigative journalists to worry about. Businesses can bully consumers without so much as a phone call because the beat reporter has been cut. I could go on and on.

There are so many national media outlets that the biggest impact won’t be nationally. It will be locally. When the local newspaper closes down because it’s made an Enron-sized mistake, the shareholders are local readers. For a time, none of the education or city hall or cops and courts beats will be covered. Small community newspapers and sites will try to take on the new load but will initially fail, overwhelmed by the amount of coverage a newspaper had handled. Unimaginable stories will slip through the cracks.

As I said before, this is a transition. It’s temporary. Demand for news will not subside, just demand for news in print. Capitalism ensures that demand gets answered. A damaged country and damaged journalism will emerge from our collapsed industry.

Some journalists who worked for newspapers will join the new media. Others abandon the industry, either in disgust or in search of a way to support families.

Journalists are a principled group, who serve this cause as a cause, not as a business. That's our greatest strength and weakness. If we can't muster the business acumen to successfully transition our business online during the next three to five years, then newspapers will cease to exist as we know them.

This has been a round of the worst-case scenario parlor game. It’s not too late to recognize the risk of underdeveloped Web sites. And, heck, maybe readers won’t move online in a flood. The point is, newspapers are better off preparing for these possibilities than not.

Yahoo launched its own answers site. Not sure whether Amazon came out with its version first. As you might recall, I asked a question using the Amazon site, Askville. And I’m happy to report it provided a good answer.

Since then, I’ve asked some tougher questions and gotten no responses. Answers sites aren’t a panacea for obscure questions yet.

The Yahoo site came to my attention because when a user posted a link to HeraldTribune.com, we got a heap of refer traffic. These answers sites might be an effective marketing tool.

Rob Curley has made a daring prediction for the future. Now, Rob claims he’s not a futurist. But he’s gone out on a limb. Here it goes:

In the future, newspapers, will still be called “newspapers.”

OK, so it’s not a very long limb.

Rob shares this nugget during an interview with an Italian newspaper. Elsewhere in the interview, Rob shares some good advice. The question:

If you were to speak with a publisher in Italy whose media group was facing the same challenges as an analogous American media company, what are some precise suggestions you would give in order meet those challenges?

The answer includes several bullet point items, and on his site Rob details each one. The list is an effective 2007 agenda for any newspaper.com:

• Own breaking news
• Hyper-local content
• Embrace databases
• Multimedia
• Evergreen content
• Make sure your content can work on any device imaginable
• Make sure your newspaper isn’t a monologue, but a dialogue with you audience

Rob has obviously spent more time fleshing out near-term plans than long-view ones.

The way to save newspapers isn’t by offering less coverage.

The latest example is sports agate, eliminated this time from The Hartford Courant in response to budget cuts. As you know, fans love agate. Isn’t “fan” the root of fanatic? Cutting agate makes reading the newspaper a lot less useful, fun and necessary for them.

In a column by the reader representative, the sports editor says it was a choice between bad and worse:

Jeff Otterbein explained to those who e-mailed and called that "when making choices of what to cut out of the Sports section, we were faced with a big challenge. We needed to cut the equivalent of one-half to two-thirds of a page each day. Something had to give."

To which, one angry reader responded:

In an age where the print media is fighting to remain relevant and viable, The Courant appears to be doing everything it can to declare its irrelevance.

I have to agree. Newspapers rationalize changes like these because readers can be sent online to get agate, stock listings, movie times and TV times. If a reader goes to the Web to get the info, they’re soon going to realize they can get the stories online, too. And then one day they’re going to wonder, what the heck do I subscribe to that paper for?

The Courant’s official note to readers said:

The Courant is reducing the amount of agate on our Scoreboard page each day, eliminating the majority of summaries from the NBA and NHL as well as parimutuel entries and results . . . Please visit our website for NBA or NHL summaries.

That last word, “summaries,” probably should say, “coverage” instead.

Many wondered aloud why Bill O’Reilly would venture onto a show with a comedian who is clearly making fun of him. Well, the answer is obvious.

With a parade of oddball offers to buy the company, The Tribune is reportedly investigating “self-help” as an alternative. (That’s right; that’s what they’re calling it.)

But details are still sketchy as we await a formal comment from Dr. Phil.

Meanwhile, here’s how the Chicago Tribune reported it:

Sources close to the situation said on Friday that Tribune may be leaning toward a so-called "self-help'' strategy that could be built from a combination of tactics. Options mentioned have included taking on a substantial amount of debt to fund a special dividend, selling or spinning off Tribune's broadcast assets, and perhaps taking the rest of the company private in a smaller leveraged buyout than was originally anticipated.

Regular readers of this blog know I’ve suggested newspaper companies take themselves private as a way to avoid Wall Street’s ADHD. The best part about this new introspective Tribune, though, is the next sentence:

Although there are many risks and hurdles associated with these options, the sources said the self-help route had gained currency since the offers generated by Tribune's auction were less than appealing.

Yes, self-help is inherently more risky than letting someone else do the hard work. If only I could sell my own problems to the highest bidder.

UPDATE: Rupert Murdoch has taken a liking to the Tribune company. No word yet on what this does to the "self help" option.

When Michael Richards was caught screaming a well known racial slur at black members of his audience, most newspapers didn’t use the n-word to report the incident. Actually, I can’t find a single serious newspaper that actually spelled out the word. Not even in a quote.

The same standard isn’t being used for the f-word, which was used by Isaiah Washington of Grey’s Anatomy fame to denigrate fellow actor, T.R. Knight, who recently came out.

The anti-gay slur was mentioned repeatedly in quotes from Washington and Knight, who went on the Ellen DeGeneres show to talk about what happened. I shouldn't have to say this. But apparently I do: It’s not OK to use a slur even if it’s in a quote.

Offenders include:

• StarTribune.com
• LATimes.com
• ABCNews.com
• Variety
• Associated Press

Because its stories are posted around the world, the AP is probably the worst offender of all. The latest AP article throws the word out there, even at the end of a story about how offensive gay groups say it is to use the f-word. Hello? Were you not reading your own story? Don’t use the word.

Kudos go to the likes of The New York Times, which never used the word during a recent story that successfully outlined how the whole incident unfolded.

As someone who has been called the f-word, I can tell you that newspapers should avoid being associated with the type of people who use it. Generally, these folks are narrow-minded or immature . . . not qualities to link with your brand.

During a recent speaking engagement caught on video, Craig Newmark shared his reasons for financially supporting efforts such as Daylife, which has nothing to do with classifieds and more to do with news. The Craigslist founder says his donations are, “so small they don’t matter.” But I have a feeling they’re worth mentioning.

Newmark shows an affinity for hard-nosed journalism:

(Newspaper chains) are cutting back on stuff like investigative journalism because that's very expensive and they think people don't care about it. Cause, as you've seen, the whole nature of news media is changing, and newspapers are becoming less and less popular. People are getting their news from alternative sources.

Newmark offers kudos to a short list of alternatives: HuffingtonPost.com, Gawker Media and Dan Gilmore’s Center for Citizen Media.

Newmark praised citizen journalists for not being afraid to “speak truth to power,” something he chastised the White House press corps for failing to do during the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Still, he said citizen media has its foibles. Namely, the facts. Newmark is a fan of big media for its stringent dedication to professionally fact-checking before publishing.

Newmark clarifies that he does, “actually support mainstream media in a lot of ways.”

Thanks goes to a reader of this blog for tipping us off to the video.

Thanks to a tip from a reader, we’re about to get a closer look at Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. During a speech and Q&A; session, he was repeatedly self-deprecating and entirely candid about why Craigslist charges some of its users and not others.

Newmark acknowledged the unfairness. See if you notice the key word in his answer that should alarm newspaper execs.

We are inconsistent in that way. For example, we charge 25 bucks for a job posted here but not in Kansas, per say. And the reason is because the market in New York is mature, in the sense that it’s a nice solid job board, where you get an enormous amount of value for almost nothing. But also there is enough sketchy kind of jobs posted or outright scams in a city like our New York site such that by charging this token amount that discourages a lot of bad stuff from being posted. And that works in practice.

Did you catch the caveat, “mature,” in his answer? As I’ve warned before, Newmark’s strategy seems to be, first, stealing market share from newspapers by giving away ads for free. Then, when market share is solidified (a.k.a. “mature”), start charging users to post ads.

Of course, Newmark claims he’s not charging to make money. No. He’s charging because people want to be charged. Here’s how he explains that philosophy:

We started charging for apartment listings from brokers, and only in New York, in mid June of last year. The brokers asked us to charge them. They figured there would be less pressure to post and repost the same property. And we all figured it would get rid of the outright scammers and so on. That's worked really well. The amount of money involved is not much. And we honestly don't care about it. It's a token amount. But it's gotten rid of a lot of the crap, and it's gotten rid, as far as we can tell, all of the redundancy. The amount of postings dropped maybe 80 or 90 percent and that's good for everyone. The amount of complaints has gone down tremendously.

Newmark infers that charging was the only solution to this problem of bad ads and pressure to post for brokers. I disagree. Sounds more like a lack of imagination. And the folks in the audience seemed to pick up on it.

One asked why Craigslist doesn’t use a reputation system for sellers, similar to its partner eBay. Newmark’s response was a mess of inconsistencies.

I like the idea of connecting to user reputation systems. Because in real life, I mean, our reputation is a big chunk because you're reputation is how much people trust you. I like the idea of reputation systems online. People aren't really suggesting them to us. I do like the idea a great deal, but because people aren’t asking us, we have frankly procrastinated in that regards. And we, you know, have limited resources. For example, a lot of our technology resources are dedicated all the time to keeping the site fast and keeping the site as secure as we can make it.

Did you catch all those excuses crammed into one answer? First, let’s deal with this suggestion that absolutely no one is asking for a reputation system. The moderator seemed to smell a skunk on that one.

Moderator: “Since you asked would people like a reputation system, can we take a vote?” About a third of the audience raised their hands. It was an embarrassing moment for Mr. Newmark. Looks like it's time to stop with that excuse.

Secondly, Newmark claims “limited resources.” That directly contradicts other comments made during the appearance. For example:

We're not starving or really skimping or anything like that. At some point, you just don't have to make anymore (money). That's the way that works for us.

In one instance, Newmark insists that Craigslist is making plenty of money and has no need for more. And then in another instance, he’s claiming they’ve got limited resources and can’t work on improvements.

Newmark is obviously opposed to any option that doesn’t include charging for ads. And he’ll come up with any excuse he can to avoid alternative solutions until one day Craigslist charges in numerous “mature” markets.

Craig Newmark doesn’t accept the charge that Craigslist is a threat to newspapers. In fact, he says classified ad managers like what he’s doing.

They pretty consistently like what we are about and our spirit, even though we are making their lives much harder. It's a perverse phenomenon, but that's the way things are evolving . . . The greatest threat, though, to classifieds in newspapers has more to do with the rather aggressive marketing done by some of the specialized classifieds-related sites like the jobs sites, the car sites. They market aggressively. They will do things like calling up or e-mailing advertisers, doing a really heavy sell, and that takes a lot more business from newspaper classifieds than we do.

He’s right about one thing: If newspapers lose jobs and car listings, they’ll find themselves in a drought of revenue. But I guess Newmark forgot that his site posts an awful lot of job ads. Car ads, too. I guess since he’s not even trying to get those ads, he figures it doesn’t hurt newspapers as much. I don’t see the difference.

All I can say is, and you believed him?

Oodle (created by Craig Donato) has a genius idea of combining all classified ads into one search. It’s simple. Just index all classifieds and scrape the important information into fields. Problem is Oodle doesn’t include Craigslist in its search results.

Why? You ask.

Here’s how Forbes reported it:

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has told Craig Donato to steer clear of his site's listings, saying they are not meant to be used as commodities for commercial purposes. Donato has honored Newmark's request, even though the lack of Craigslist, which draws 14 million visitors a month, weakens Oodle's all-in-one selling point.

Newmark claims his ads aren’t for commercial purposes, and you believed him?

There are so many reasons that Craigslist is a commercial venture that I’m not even going to list them. Instead, I point out this moment of naivety for everyone to enjoy.

Maybe there's some other reason Donato isn't indexing Craigslist. Maybe it's fear of a lawsuit or a need to avoid spamvertising. For his reputation's sake, I hope so.

Let's cap this spate of posts about Craigslist and its founder, Craig Newmark, with a link to a recent podcast interview.

Talking again about citizen journalism, Newmark reiterates his belief that "the people who by consensus are saying more important things" have a talent for speaking truth to power. And he criticizes the mainstream media on that quality, saying, "sometimes they are not allowed to or fear to speak truth to power."

The interviewer doesn't ask Newmark to elaborate on the charge that media are afraid of powerful people. Would have been an interesting follow-up. And I have no idea what prompts Newmark to allege that the media is sometimes not allowed to challenge powerful people.

Newmark sums up the danger of citizen journalism to mainstream media this way: "Some companies will do really well and some may disappear."

And that's probably the most straightforward he's been about the importance of citizen media.

Amidst the stack of articles I save as possible fodder for this blog was this one about how Netflix uses a fast iterative design process to continually improve the service. It’s another one the many things newspaper Web sites can learn from Netflix.

Over time, newspapers tend to let their site’s original design scheme slowly retard itself in a manner akin to urban sprawl. What was once concise or purposeful loses meaning as the latest priority, which absolutely has to be featured more prominently on every page of the site, is posted and then replaced or amended.

Netflix doesn’t do major redesigns. Instead, they slightly redesign every two weeks. Yes, two weeks. Changes sometimes last only as long.

At first it sounds a little kooky, sure. But the article outlines worthwhile benefits:

• Fail fast, so bad changes are eliminated more quickly.
• More experimentation leads to more productivity.
• Learn quickly from experiments instead of arguing over theories.
• Reduce risk with small, proven changes instead of big, untestable ones.
• Culture change is inevitable.

Sometimes the benefit of a major redesign is just getting everyone – and I mean everyone from top to bottom – onto the same philosophical page.