Empowering Joe the Cobbler for automated profit

The dire straits our industry are rushing down have me thinking like a businessman, not just a "journalist." And one thing I keep coming back to is the need for us to master self-service, search-based advertising.

Google and Yahoo are stealing and eating our lunch on this. It's the only way to get back any piece of the massive amount of classified advertising dollars that went to the C'list and some other Monsters.

Here's a post from Mark Glaser's MediaShift blog on the subject.

Mark interviews Stephen Gray, managing director of the American Press Institute's Newspaper Next project; who wisely points out that newspapers need to help local businesses reach customers at the moment they show interest in a product or service. (Searching for "shoe repair"? Here are the cobblers in your neighborhood.)

But the thing is, it doesn't pay to send sales reps out to service the contract of every cobbler in the county. Instead, we have to make it super easy for Joe the Cobbler (sorry) to select, pay for and post his own ads on our sites. The Orange County Register and its publications are doing it.

Look at it this way: Google doesn't employ commissioned ad salespeople. It has machines and code that perform that job. We're going to have to have the same capability to keep up.

Ah the pitfalls of the Wild West Web

Here's a couple obvious examples of how the World Wide Web remains a Wild West world:

1) On the one hand, I can think of a jillion ways that the resources available online have made covering the news easier. On the other, you can't believe everything someone sends you in an E-mail. (No!)

Apparently that shocker is news to an MSNBC newsgatherer, who caused the network to give credit for the leak about Sarah Palin's Africa continent-vs.-country confusion (Gafferica anyone?) to a clever hoaxer who's snared other journalists in his, um, web of deception. (See "A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence" in the New York Times.)

While it sounds careless, this fake expert is slick, an example of the lengths people will go to to game the news system. (A la Steve Jobs is sick.)

2) Did you know, as the New York Daily News reports, that "Drug dealers are doing a roaring trade on Craigslist?" I am shocked! On Craigslist? No way!

But a solution is at hand that actually makes money for the C'list.

Craigslist, the Daily News reports, could require drug dealers to do the same thing it did to "erotic services" providers so its ads aren't used to procure prostitutes or exploit children: to pay $10 for each listing paid with credit card, providing tracking data cops can then subpoena.

I see a new business model here. Wait. Bad idea. Never mind.