The always interesting Mark Pincus, founder of Tribe.net, muses on What Rupert (Murdoch) should do online, and in musing about why NewsCorp should buy Craigslist, comes up with some good advice all local newspapers(and aren’t all newspapers local?) should follow:

• go after the business opportunity of community classifieds.
• use newspapers to drive my online classifieds business.
• offer free liners (that’s the small text classifieds that use weird acronyms and are unreadable anyway) as an incentive to post online – ie. you get free newspaper placement for giving us the gift of your free online listing. maybe you can charge $5 but doesnt really matter.
• go for all color print classifieds for cars and housing.
• use branded local papers to drive community.
• transform papers to an about.com model where most editorial/writing staff are part timers and a lot of content is coming from other sources.
• turn ad people into reps for local media, both offline and online.

Mark’s got more ideas here–if I was GM of a local news site, I’d read the whole thing and implement some of his ideas.
(Via Buzzmachine)