Yahoo has hired Hilary Schneider from Knight-Ridder to run the company's new Marketplaces division, encompassing Yahoo's various classifieds ads sites like jobs, autos and personals - as well as the travel and shopping sites, Bloomberg reports.

She knows something of the online classifieds business from her work at K-R, especially competing with Craigslist. Interestingly, PaidContent.org ran an interview with her as " one of the most visionary newspaper industry executives on the subject of newspapers in the digital age." No doubt she is top-notch talent; but does it say something that Yahoo is reaching to newspapers instead of to the online world? It certainly says something about K-R's future that it is losing one of its top executives who understands the rapidly shifting economic models.

Here's some good stuff from that interview:

Q: But wouldn't you concede that Craigslist has been a rude wake-up call for newspapers?



A: Craigslist is a fascinating phenomenon, and one of the things it has done is expand the market for person-to-person listings. We did some quantitative research, which showed that 40% of those looking to conduct person-to-person transactions primarily use non-traditional advertising methods, such as word-of-mouth, e-mail, fliers, etc.

In response to this trend, we improved our classified product in November 2004. We upgraded our search and navigation capabilities and added new, cool features like photos, RSS feeds and others. The pricing is very inexpensive, and, in some cases, it's actually free, with the idea being that consumers will pay for advanced features and enhanced placement of their ads.

And, via Susan Mernit, from an E&P interview:

As newspaper companies, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to allow a reporter to publish under the media brand directly to the Web -- without any editing? This is different than traditional editorial workflow, which has multiple levels of editorial checks and balances. To provide transparency to users, blogs should be clearly labeled: what is edited by us, what is written by us but published in real-time, and what is self-published by other users. The business model to sustain this kind of publishing is still to be determined, but to reference Tribe.net, we think user-generated content, powered by social networking, has potential to drive traffic, revenue, and listings in our local markets.