Then he asked, "Is this a new medium, or is it simply moving classifieds a different way?" Although "classifieds on-line are a natural extension of print," Welch said, "I need to test a mix of information, formats and services. I need to assess profitability."

His customers are demanding that their ads be on the 'Net because it provides expanded distribution of their wares. Automotive advertisers, Welch said, like the extended exposure of limited stock, while employment advertisers appreciate the ability to expose the entire staffing inventory. And real estate advertisers, he said, like the ability to expose their entire listings inventory.

Returning to Winter's point about Cox's integrated Internet presence, Welch asked, "What do I want from my partner, Cox Interactive Media? New search solutions that will consolidate indexing. Flawless technological execution. An attractive replica of my print product.

"So let's put the classified up, make a buck and make the advertisers happy," Welch said. "There's only one problem: If that's all we do, we're going to be in a lot of trouble."

Winter concurred: "Simply replicating the print product is not going to do it." The aggregate share of the Web's audience for search engine sites was between 60 and 70 percent, he noted, while newspapers have less than nine percent.

Winter suggested that the audience try typing the words "Atlanta + real estate" into any of the Web's search engines and find out what would happen (we tried Infoseek and got almost 4 million pages). "It's going to be tough to preserve the middleman role," he said.

Saying that "the length of a classified ad is fundamentally a product of the price of newsprint and gasoline," Winter suggested that to protect the newspaper industry's market for classified advertising, it "turn classifieds into a product."

"The first step is to build attractive and useful content around the core classifieds," he said, suggesting that real estate ads be accompanied by mortgage calculators and school district information.

"If you think that replicating your print product is enough," he said, "you will be bypassed and you will lose."

The legacy of legacies
A session on how to integrate pre-press-based advertising systems into the World-Wide Web didn't quite address that issue, but panelists did provide some perspective on how traditional pre-press suppliers view the 'Net world.

The vast majority of his customers have chosen to "repurpose print and not integrate it into the paper's marketing program at all," said Al Marshall, vice president of sales and marketing at Sacramento-based System Integrators Inc.

Marshall said newspapers are relying exclusively on their internal technology groups to deal with on-line efforts, which is problematic. "These are strained," he said. "They have four or five systems and seven different servers they're trying to sustain. They don't have the bandwidth to support the ad directors."

SII, Marshall said, views the features of new media as extensions of features the company already had developed for print. "Like logos, you'll have graphics or a sound file or a video file," he said. "The difficult one is pricing based on transactions."

Eugene Kiel, vice president of marketing at CText Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., said his customers are employing simple rating schemes for the Internet. "Forty percent are putting ads on for no charge and 30 percent are putting them up with a flat charge," he said.

Kiel basically conceded the new media marketplace to companies that have no print background. "We have our hands full," he said. "There's a whole cluster of vendors who are here today that do serve that side."

Michael Wilson, director of classified advertising at the Wall Street Journal, suggested technology isn't so much the issue as is how newspapers think about their 'Net presence. Wilson said the Journal is now investing time and energy in a new web site, careers.wsj.com.

"That puts Dow Jones into the recruitment business," Wilson said. "The fact of the matter is that we intend to use [the Internet] as a way to participate in markets that had previously been unavailable."

When Moderator Bob Gilbert, the president of Norfolk, Va.-based InfiNet, asked the panelists to jump into a time machine and go ahead a year, two of the three agreed immediately.

"How much money do we need to invest?" CText's Kiel asked.

"The biggest challenge is going to be money," the Journal's Wilson said. "It's going to be millions and millions of dollars. In the mode of experimentation we're going though, I'm not sure we're going to have many more solutions than we have this year."

Ads by remote control
In a session examining the latest ways advertisers get their information to publishers, panelists danced around the notion that customers could automatically upload ads from a web-based interface.

"Eighty percent of our ads are coming at us via remote entry," said Nancy Massa, recruitment advertising manager at the Los Angeles Times. "It's hard to image how we ever typed in all those liners."

Bruce Skillings, executive vice president for the western region at Bernard Hodes Advertising in Palo Alto, Calif., said, "Last year we placed about 500 million executive search ads; about 10 percent of them were electronically delivered. The rest were fax, phone and a lot of them were picked up and delivered. Of the electronic transmissions we've done, about 98 percent were 9600 baud."

Analog reconciliations, not digital delivery, pose the biggest problem his company has with newspapers, Skillings said. "Every month we get reams and reams of paper to rectify bills. We want electronic files where we could reconcile invoices," he said.

The panel was asked whether an existing sales force can be used to upsell new media.

"It's frightening for salespeople," said the Times' Massa. "They see it some ways as a job eliminator. They are print experts and they don't understand the new media language."

Massa said her paper is having its new media department work closely with the print classified department, and the print operation is hiring Internet sales specialists.

"It's difficult for sales forces to sell on-line," said Keith Yokum, director of classifieds for Boston.com, the web site of the Boston Globe. "It's brand new and we've struggled with it." The Globe and its on-line operation have a steering committee to work on how to handle common business, Yokum said.

Ad agency exec Skillings wrapped up with this thought: "We've been using technology to communicate with our clients for a long time. This is a 'now' business and we've got to be able to react quickly. We've improved, using extranets and the Internet in general.

"The major next step would be to bring the publisher into that process. We still don't know what's going to be printed on Sunday. We still don't know if the ad is going to go in upside down."

Database or databust
"Newspapers are accustomed to collecting text streams and the way we collect data in the industry is almost useless for anything except print."

With that condemnation, David DiMilo, the director of software development at Knight Ridder New Media of San Jose, kicked off the discussion on database applications in web publishing.

"The challenge for the industry is to rethink and reinvent," DiMilo said. Under review, he said, should be "the way we collect content, the way we manage content, the way we format content, and how to publish and format content in different media."

Much of what has happened in the newspaper industry's end of web publishing has been marketing-oriented partnerships, not technology oriented, DiMilo said. Because of this, we're now to where "the Web has created three-year-old legacy systems," he said.

Knight Ridder's 25 newspapers with web sites have found themselves having to reinvent their hosting architecture and their data architecture, DiMilo said. The company's goals were to convert unstructured content to structured content, separate format (mark-up) from content, store (and preferably originate) content in databases, use attribute and keyword searching together, sell ads on-line and create a national service, he said.

He re-emphasized: "Everything we write and create should be in a database and fielded."

From the vantage point of Rakesh Mathur, president, chief executive officer and founder of Junglee Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif., databases are a newspaper's best friend.

"We're complete believers that databases are the key piece of technology and business model to preserve the $16 billion classifieds industry," he told the crowd. Junglee's technology takes unstructured, unfielded job information scattered all around the World-Wide Web, gives it structure and loads it into client newspapers' databases.

Because "80 percent of the open jobs that haven't made it into print are available on web sites," Mathur said, his software would allow newspapers to "convert the Internet into a giant classifieds 'virtual' database warehouse."

At Tribune Interactive Inc., the Chicago-based subsidiary of media giant Tribune Co., "our strategy has been to treat classifieds as our No. 1 resource," said Mike Silver, the division's general manager.

"Back in the early '90s," Silver said, "we started treating advertising as content. The fact is, ads are content for people just as much as what reporters write."

Category killer
The penultimate session of the conference suggested that if you could merge editorial content with classified ads, you'd create a "vertical category killer."

"We have to rethink both what classifieds are and what editorial is," warned Dan Hontz, on-line services manager at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix. Editorial can mean functionality, he suggested -- a basic mortgage calculator, a household moving planner or a salary calculator all are "editorial" components that can extend advertising.

For Gordon Kent, a product manager for the Community Newspaper Co. of Needham, Mass., editorial linked to advertising means that users can "make informed, in-time decisions. It showcases content. It keeps users on your site."

Kent suggested that when a user searches your site for a specific type of ad, "Boolean logic connects the classified key elements with related content repurposed from editorial."

He also pointed out that "40 percent of people searching your classifieds are actually looking to buy; the other 60 percent are gauging the marketplace."

The character of Internet shoppers is changing, said Tim Ruder, director of on-line classified advertising at Digital Ink, the on-line subsidiary of the Washington Post.

"I have talked to people who have spent as little as 20 minutes in an auto dealership to make a $30,000 purchase," Ruder said. He believes that consumers' expectations of the buying experience is changing; in addition, "they have a much better idea of what they want."

The Post's focus has been on recruitment ads, he said; Digital Ink has 119 customers who are on-line only. In addition, the paper's web site runs recruitment liners from the previous two Sundays. The totals: 24,000 listings, of which 6000 are from each of the Sunday print products and 12,000 are from the 119 advertisers who are on-line only.

Wrapping up the session was Steve Taylor, executive vice president of the Boston Globe and president of Boston Globe Electronic Publishing.

The question of whether advertising or editorial was content is "semantic in nature," Taylor said. "If it's editorial or directory or journalism raises some interesting points."

Taylor suggested that we look at "outfits like Yahoo! who might think of classifieds and content as synonyms. When you get back to core principles, you have to think hard about content that you might add to your classifieds site."

-- dmc

AD-STAR Publishing Technologies,
(310) 577-8255,
e-mail: adstar@adstar.com;
Electric Classifieds Inc.,
(415) 977-5359,
e-mail: tom@eci.net;
FutureTense,
(508) 263-5480,
e-mail: info@futuretense.com;
InfiNet Co.,
(757) 664-2239,
e-mail: affmktg@norfolk.infi.net;
Management Process Integrators Inc.,
(602) 596-9357,
e-mail: dfrenkel@mpiinc.com;
System Integrators Inc.,
(916) 929-9481,
e-mail: sii@sii.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, February 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.