The effort to launch a national newspaper classified advertising portal in the U.S. is dead. (At least for now.)

In early July, the AIM Group reported on a private meeting of more than 20 U.S. and Canadian newspaper decision makers, and executives at American Press Institute (API) and Newspaper Association of America (NAA), in an effort to launch a national classified advertising platform common to newspapers that would compete with Craigslist. Three classified platform providers attended as well, to show their wares and discuss what they might offer to get this off the ground. We predicted, partly based on the skepticism of the attendees with whom we talked, that it wouldn’t get off the ground.

Indeed, it hasn’t. We just talked with Randy Bennett, NAA’s SVP, business development, who told us, “The effort has ended. Three [newspaper] CEOs gathered in July and determined that there was not a consensus to develop a national classified network. Each will pursue their own initiatives.”

As AIM Group founder Peter M. Zollman pointed out in his blog post, if only they’d tried to launch a national initiative years ago, it might have worked. But in 2009? Too late.