Print Classifieds for the Internet Age As an Editor & Publisher "interactive media" columnist, it's fairly rare that I write about print. But there's at least one component of the typical printed newspaper that's especially relevant to the digital side of the business, and is in dire need of rethinking: classifieds.
By
Steve Outing
(September 02, 2008) -- As an Editor & Publisher "interactive media" columnist, it's fairly rare that I write about print. But there's at least one component of the typical printed newspaper that's especially relevant to the digital side of the business, and is in dire need of rethinking: classifieds.
At the majority of newspapers, the printed classifieds section looks pretty much the same as it did 10, 20, 30, even 40 years ago. Pick up your local daily newspaper and you'll probably see dense pages of liner ads (interspersed with display ads, of course) displayed vertically in 10 narrow columns. That typical "design" (and I'm hesitant even to use that word, since many classifieds sections exhibit no evidence that a professional designer spent much time on them) is not easy to scan or search. The classifieds reader has to know what he or she's looking for, and pore over many columns of hard-to-read small type.
Of course, online has pretty much won the classified wars -- and newspaper print classifieds are on the wane, even though still bringing in a decent share of money. So a few newspapers are starting to redesign, indeed reinvent, their print classifieds sections -- perhaps, they hope, to turn the declines around. In this column I'll take a look at a couple of them: the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times' BayLink section, and in Baltimore, The Sun's new FindIt! recruitment classifieds section -- introduced recently as part of an overall, major redesign ordered up by the beleaguered Tribune Co.
It's not about search anymore
Here's the crux of the matter: It used to be that printed classifieds were where you went to look for something specific. A new car. A job. An apartment to rent. You went there to search for something, by finding the appropriate section and combing through the columns of type. Today, it's most common to go online to fulfill those needs or desires. Craigslist, Cars.com, Realtor.com, Match.com, or the online classifieds at your local newspaper Web site. The online experience is, obviously, far better suited for searching than pages of printed classifieds; you can't exactly punch in a keyword to find something on the printed page.
So what to do with print classifieds? Turn them into an appealing ad-editorial mix that gets readers flipping through the pages even if they're not looking for anything specifically.
The age of the pure-advertising classifieds section appears to be coming to a close.
Experimenting in hurricane country
Last May, the St. Petersburg Times (which is owned by the Poynter Institute) debuted a radically different looking classifieds section called BayLink. It contains a strong mix of traditional classifieds (mostly liners, with some classifieds-related display ads), and a variety of editorial features. Within this "classifieds" section, you'll also see some unrelated display ads adjacent to relevant editorial content.
The concept is simple enough: Make the section so appealing, with quality editorial content that readers will seek out, that everyone will turn through the pages of the Section Formerly Known as Classifieds, and perhaps on the way through, spot an ad that's interesting. There's more power for the section, the reasoning goes, if it attracts the casual reader/browser, as well as the people who are looking for something specifically (and for whatever reason still do so in print rather than online). Combined with a print-online strategy, the hope is to breathe some new life into printed classifieds.
Here's some example content that showed up in several days worth of printed BayLink sections:
- Staff reporter piece about a resident trying to get back his abducted dog. - Staff piece about an ice cream worker for an ongoing feature, "Working Class Hero." - Daily reader-submitted photo. - "On the Move" feature of business appointments, promotions, etc. - Crossword puzzle and other puzzles. - Comics. - Horoscope. - Movie times listings (and ads from theaters). - Advice and consumer watchdog columns (including Dear Abby). - TV listings grid. - Careers Q&A feature (to accompany recruitment ads). - "On the Bookshelf" feature about home-related books (to accompany real estate ads). - Automotive feature stories (to accompany auto ads).
The site has made some other changes that make print classifieds more modern and usable. For example, the section front contains four blocks of featured liner ads in Autos, Homes, Jobs, and Stuff. These are "upsells," meaning that advertisers pay extra to be featured. (The size of each block is two columns of a six-column format by 3.5 inches.)
A key change in how the Times treats classifieds is how it lays out its liner ads, moving to a six-column format from a 10-column one. (The latter remains the most commonly used classifieds layout in printed newspapers that use the broadsheet format, at least in the U.S. If you want to cram a lot of liners onto a page and make the presentation truly unreadable, the 10-column format is the way to go.)
Also notable is an attempt (finally!) at making printed liner ads more readable and searchable. For Autos ads, for instance, the top line of each ad is boldface, with tabbed information that's easy to scan through. Example: an ad for a car has this as the first line: VW....Beetle....2003....$14,481
Michelle Hatch, the Times' classifieds manager, explains that the redesign was meant to turn a jumbled and confused library of ads into something that would make it easy for readers to browse and find what they're looking for, as well as attract casual page turners. While it obviously can't match the efficiency of the online experience, this is a major improvement over the mess that came before (and still exists at too many newspapers).
Hatch says that in coming up with the new BayLink design, the team went into a room with a bunch of invited local advertisers and a blank sheet of paper. Rather than try to come up with ways to tweak or change what already existed, the intent was to come up with something completely different -- and unlike what the rest of the newspaper industry is publishing.
She reports "very positive" reader and advertiser feedback, including (and this is the important part) reports of readers finding ads to respond to and purchasing things as a result of initially reading through the section only to play a puzzle or read the comics. Yes, newspapers have tried many times to add some content in with the classifieds, such as moving comics into the section. But for that to work, the classifieds themselves must be redesigned to be more useful and easy to scan. Editorial content alone can't do the job.
Also working well for advertisers, Hatch says, are the featured blocks of liners on BayLink's front page (upsold liners for Autos, Homes, Jobs, and Stuff). It was important as part of the design to keep some classified liner ads on the section front to confirm to readers that yes, this is still the place to find classified ads.
The 'Sun' rises its classifieds
The deeply troubled Tribune Co. (saddled with billions of debt after Sam Zell took over the company, on top of a bad economy and the rough transition of newspapers into the digital economy) has been rolling out significant redesigns of its newspapers recently, including at The Sun of Baltimore. As part of the Sun's "reinvention," the design team made an attempt at radically re-doing the recruitment section of its classifieds. A new tab jobs section runs on Sundays (and in the Monday youth free paper published by the Sun) and is called "FindIt!"
Tribune Co. chief innovation officer Lee Abrams boasted prior to the introduction of FindIt! that the Sun team is "REALLY diving in and blowing up the classified playbook and starting over." (That quote is from a company memo published on Poynter's Romenesko media blog.) He wrote then that a key component of the overall classifieds thinking is: "A great part of what they are working on is that they are aggressively trying to take people INTO the section as entertainment. They're taking genres of products like Glass Products, Vintage Clothing, etc. and not only highlighting those products, but discussing them with visuals. A really nice hook."
So far, FindIt! is where the real innovation is; other sections of the Sun's classifieds can more accurately be described as incremental improvements on the traditional classifieds model. FindIt! is a tab section, while the rest of the classifieds sections are broadsheet (like the rest of the paper).
According to the Sun's new director of marketing, Renee Mutchnik, the idea behind FindIt! is somewhat similar to St. Pete's BayLink in that it is moving recruitment classifieds away from being a dull listing of job ads, and toward a more useful and entertaining mix of career-related editorial content and ads. Where the old Sun jobs classifieds were only for people specifically looking for jobs, FindIt! is meant to appeal also to "passive" job seekers.
By that, she means people who may already have jobs, but might be open to moving if they learned about something better or more interesting. So by providing some entertaining and useful editorial content to suck in the already employed, they are exposed to new opportunities. Of course, the idea is also to give the active job seeker everything that he/she needs, as well.
One difference between the St. Pete and Baltimore approaches is the origin of editorial content. With FindIt!, content mostly comes from freelancers and syndicated sources; the section is edited and managed by the advertising department, with no newsroom involvement. In St. Pete, a BayLink editor is in charge of editorial selection; in addition to some syndicated content, the newsroom staff writes for the section, too.
User-generated content is minimal in both products, but could be utilized more in the future. An example from FindIt! is a feature where office workers send in their "office horror stories and gripes about co-workers," or photos of messy cubicles.
In terms of the ads themselves, FindIt!'s aren't as visually pleasing or easy to read as BayLink's. Both products do have the advantage of attracting non-classifieds display advertising. For instance, with the Sun's FindIt! section's Happy Hour Calendar, ads are being sold to local bars.
Fire up the designers
Obviously, the competitive environment for newspaper classifieds is fierce. But for the industry to come back, it must leverage its core advantage, which is the combination of print and online being a stronger offering (in theory) than online-only classifieds services. Newspapers can still reach the segment of the older demographic that isn't yet enamored with using online for things like classifieds, and that counts for a lot.
Yet in these days of sophisticated classifieds niche online services, the old design of printed classifieds sections looks, frankly, archaic. Many still desperately need to be integrated with their online products. I'm happy to see some innovation appearing on the scene. Every newspaper that publishes classifieds needs to redo them in a way that reflects the importance of the Internet in our lives, and its new dominance when it comes to classifieds.
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Print Classifieds for the Internet Age
