E-Classified Standard Coming Online
by Andrew Bowser
With would-be classified competitors aggregating advertising on a nationwide level, newspapers now struggle to get classified ads out of creaky front-ends and into the new-media loop.
To help solve the dilemma, about three dozen newspaper staffers and vendors are trying to develop standard record structures for classifieds. What comes out of the working group, it's hoped, will make it easier to aggregate ads, republish them in print directories and on the World Wide Web, share them with other publishers in national or regional networks, and allow for easy, targeted online database searches.
This brain trust is not trying to hash out an HTML or SGML-style format for classifieds. Instead, the group simply wants to identify the basic content fields for each type of ad. The automobile fields, for example, might include make, model, year, price, ZIP code and contact phone number.
"Those are the critical criteria," says Kevin McCourt, NAA's director of real-estate advertising and online classifieds. "Everything else is negotiable."
The data components, when developed, could serve as building blocks for some ambitious new protocols for formatting newspaper classifieds--notably the Pultizer Protocol, envisioned as a framework to port ads across publishing platforms and between different media companies.
NAA, which organized the group, plans to serve as an independent moderator and facilitator, bringing together newspaper advertising, new-media and technology staffers, as well as the vendors who presumably would work such protocols into next-generation front-end systems.
"We want newspapers to own the format," says John Iobst, NAA's director of advanced computer science. "If newspapers do it for newspapers, then we control it. If Microsoft does it for newspapers, then we're at a real disadvantage."
This isn't the first classified standard to emerge. About 10 years ago, NAA formulated the Classified Remote Entry Standard, designed to help advertisers submit a single ad to a dozen or more newspapers at once. The problem was that nobody--not even Bill Gates--anticipated the explosion of interest in the Internet, and the print-centric CREST™ does not lend itself to electronic publishing, according to Iobst.
The classified standards project kicked off May 12-13 in Houston, and was also on the agenda at the June NAA Classified Conference and Telesales Workshop in Boston.
For more information or to participate in the development process, contact John Iobst, NAA director of advanced computer science. E-mail, iobsj@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1838.
Andrew Bowser is a free-lance writer based in New Orleans. E-mail, andy001@usa.net; phone, (504) 897-4026.