The Pew Center's Internet and American Life project continues to cement a number of perceptions about the changing media landscape. Its newest finding indicates Americans are turning rapidly to online classified advertising sites.

Its latest study found 45 per cent used such sites as Craigslist, up from 22 per cent two years earlier. On a typical day, nine per cent turned to such sites, up from four per cent two years earlier.

And the cohort most strongly using the sites are the coveted 25-44 age group.

The findings are further difficult news for U.S. newspapers, which have lost revenue to the online sites.

A number of months back, veteran newsman Steve Outing extended his column and other journalism into a campaign to help reinvent the beleaguered newspaper classified ad.

This is hardly the sort of glorious effort that gets written in the blogosphere or commended in the journals, but Outing has gained quite a bit of traction in launching ReinventingClassifieds.com. He's attracted a lot of good insight from the industry and from those outside the business under siege.

His most recent post assembles many of the central notions involved in reimagining what was once the milch cow of business.

Among the approaches are these five:

1. Redesign using your best talent.
2. Redeploy to digital what you're cutting in print.
3. Rebrand yourself as a classified portal.
4. Rededicate yourself to mobile.
5. Rethink classifieds as content.

There are several more in the post, which should be required reading for sales teams --- and for that matter, circulation, marketing, finance and editorial teams.

I've been following Steve Outing's noble online exercise to reinvigorate the challenged classified section in the newspaper. It's a genuinely positive attempt to lend a community's assistance to a widespread problem.
His ReinventingClassifieds.com site has been bringing a lot of voices into the discussion. One of the most recent posts concerns how to redesign the section in order to accommodate an aging readership. He gets Jim Parkinson to help start a package that will culminate in a white paper of sorts on the matter. The interesting point: Better design for failing eyes isn't necessarily a matter of using larger typeface.

Slate Magazine has produced an argument that Wal-Mart's new online classified service, fueled by Oodle, is a possible life line for newspapers hit hard by such services as Craigslist and Kijiji.
It has to make a few assumptions to build the case, but the central argument is that Wal-Mart can serve as a great local partner by serving up aggregated local ads through its site. It asserts that newspapers need to hitch their wagons to Oodle, and in turn to Wal-Mart, to fight the new players, a kind of an Anybody But Craigslist model. For the time being, newspapers aren't partnering with Oodle.