All Posts Tagged With: "reinventingclassifieds.com"

Over on my site ReinventingClassifieds.com, we’ve just announced the winners of a couple Best Idea contests — one for media professionals and one for students. The idea for the contest was to tap the power of the crowd to come up with creative new ideas for reinvigorating newspaper classifieds and getting them growing again.

Here’s the announcement of the pro winner, David Kiessling of the New York Times Regional Media Group in Florida. He took an old concept and reintroduced it for the new-media age. The article also includes several other good ideas we received from other entrants.

For our student contest, Will Sommer of Georgetown University is the winner, for his idea to turn newspaper classifieds from dull to entertaining. He calls his concept “Laughs and Facts” and presents his ideas in a multimedia slideshow. Take a look.

Kiessling and Sommer will each be receiving $500 from ReinventingClassifieds.com and FutureOfNews as reward for their creative thinking.

Over at ReinventingClassifieds.com we’ve got a couple competitions going on, both soliciting ideas for newspapers to help turn around their stumbling classifieds operations. While we have some good ideas (we think) for helping the situation — and we’ll roll them out in the months ahead — we don’t profess to have all the answers. Ergo, let’s tap the collective intelligence of seasoned media and advertising professionals and innovative-thinking students worldwide.

So, two contests, one for college students, and one for media and advertising pros.

I hope you’ll spread the word — or enter yourself. Deadline for both competitions is December 31, 2008.

Over on my ReinventingClassified.com project, we’ve opened up a contest for college students (and recent grads), asking them to offer their ideas for solving the newspaper industry’s classifieds crisis.

Best essay (or video, audio, multimedia presentation, or whatever) wins $250. There’s a runner-up award of $50.

I believe that newspapers need to pretty much write off much of their old model and find a new way when it comes to classifieds. Professionals have started to offer their ideas on the site; now let’s see what the next generation of media folks can come up with.

Announcement here. Entry form here. PDF announcement flyer here.