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.
