If immune-from-backlash Craigslist can reduce the hassle or finding an apartment (or increase it, depending on how you look at it), brings two strangers together who exchanged a smile on the sidewalk only to walk away without exchanging numbers, and find somebody willing to take a few of your Topps baseball cards off your hands, why can't Craigslist do the impossible — and save the very newspaper industry it's supposedly killing?

If only Craigslist would implement a handful of policies, the newspapers who have been losing millions and millions in classified advertising revenue might have a chance at survival, argues Steve Outing on ReinventingClassifieds.com. In an open letter to Craig Newmark & Co., he posits:

Allow local newspapers to scrape Craigslist ads. I realize that you’ve kept Craigslist closed to this type of activity all these years, but how about opening up the walled garden a bit for a good cause? Allow the local newspaper(s) in the cities you serve to include Craigslist ads — just from that city, if that makes you more comfortable — in with their own classifieds. Ads from Craigslist would include the Craigslist brand and drive traffic back to the local Craigslist site; that’s good for you, in that it exposes your brand to (mostly older) newspaper readers who may not use Craigslist. (You’d think everyone knows Craigslist by now, but anecdotally I know that some older folks still don’t.) For the newspapers, adding Craigslist ads into newspaper classifieds sections reinvigorates them. “From Craigslist” ads could even show up in print classified sections of local newspapers (not just newspaper websites), reversing the shrunken sections’ relevance again. With a reinvigorated newspaper classifieds section, a newspaper could sell contextual display or banner advertising around it (which might support hiring back some of those lost journalists).

Allow consumers to place ads on Craigslist via newspaper websites. If a newspaper classifieds customer wants to place an ad via the paper’s online ordering system, permit them to also post it to the local Craigslist site as part of the process. Since ads coming from a newspaper site will be vetted, you know you won’t be getting spam ads. While most ads coming into Craigslist this way will be in no-fee categories, some will be for the few categories that Craigslist charges for. A newspaper site could collect that money, along with the fee paid for newspaper print/online placement, and send it to Craigslist, minus a commission. So while this is mostly a convenience for the consumer that makes using the newspaper classifieds more relevant, it’s also a revenue source. Craigslist users benefit by seeing more (high-quality) listings on Craigslist.

Add links on Craigslist to newspaper website classified sections. For example, on a Craigslist “bicycles for sale” category, add a link to the bicycles classifieds in the local paper’s website. This is good for Craigslist users; if they haven’t found the perfect bike on Craigslist, you point them to a good source for more bike ads. And of course this is great for newspapers, in that you drive traffic to their classifieds sites, helping them to be relevant again.

Add a news component to Craigslist. This is something I’ve heard you ponder in the past, Craig: some sort of community news component to be added to Craigslist sites. I’ve also heard you muse about wanting to identify the best news sources, and support the notion of citizen journalism. And I’ve read your comments about community: “Effectively, we’re a flea market, and flea markets I think are more about socializing than about commerce.” Craigslist represents a huge community in each of the cities it serves, and members of that community know a lot about what’s going on. It makes sense to add “news” to the Craigslist community, and tap that valuable local information resource that is the many Craigslist users.

Naturally, all of this assumes Craigslist wants to keep the newspaper industry alive — and cares about things like "branding" — when Camp Newmark may very well see its destruction as the inevitable journey of society's media consumption. And then they kinda would want nothing to do with any of the above suggestions.

[Reinventing Classifieds, via PC]