In an excellent MediaPost article today, Erik Sass highlights a disturbing trend for daily newspapers. On top of the erosion in real estate classifieds, an area that has long been one of the few bright spots for the industry, newspapers are seeing online job classified revenue drop. As Erik correctly points out in the article, newspapers have basically generated online job ad growth by upselling their print customers onto the web. While that generated growth for a period of time, and in some cases even those results were less than stellar, that particular revenue stream has been fully leveraged now, and the upsell opportunities are diminishing as print customers are fleeing the daily papers altogether. The trick for the dailies now is to start selling their online classifieds as a stand-alone product independent of their print offerings. Given the quality of their sales forces and their track record in the past, I wouldn’t put money on them.