Classifieds

I wondered if newspapers still ran classifieds so, when our local Montclarian appeared in our driveway, it seemed the perfect moment to satisfy that nugget of curiosity. We haven't had a newspaper subscription in years, you see. 

At first, we both grew weary of the general lousiness of the "local" papers - the San Francisco Chronicle and Tribune (before they became one), and the Oakland Tribune (which never really amounted to one newspaper at all). Maureen grew up reading the Chicago Tribune, I dallied with both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Small wonder, then, that we were print journalism snobs.

Given my accidental career in public relations, I've long been an armchair follower and critic of trends and developments in journalism. It seems to me that the consolidation train was on the tracks long before Internet news caused print media's ultimate derailment. All of the local East Bay papers, some that published Pulitzer prize reporting, folded into the Bay Area News Group in 2006, after the Alameda News Group acquired the San Jose Mercury News (and decimated the ranks of its talented and decorated reporters). That was only one year after the birth of the big mama of news aggregators, the Huffington Post.

I still read analyses from the Pew Foundation, Columbia School of Journalism, and others, about how the stodgy mastheads of the ships of information freedom and democracy failed to adapt to the new age of infobits and infographics. Much hand-wringing about the death of print journalism contributing to, if not causing, the polarization of the body politic and even some hints that we, the people, have chosen the fork of the road taking us to diminished critical thinking capacity.

It turned out that the Montclarian had a story about the reopening of a quasi-public horse riding stable near our house. Maureen and I rode there together decades ago in what I described as a condo horse arrangement. For $150 a month each, we got a couple of private riding lessons and weekend trail rides. We enjoyed the experience, and our horses Two Story and Doc. So sad when the concession folded. Given Maureen's passion for all things horses, the stable's reopening seems a wonderful employment opportunity for her. Not the classifieds, but any job lead works.

The Montclarian did have job classifieds but nothing like those I remember reading when I first moved to the Bay Area in the mid-1980s. Then, it took a long time to get through them. Every job and potential career was there for all job seekers to consider - from artists to xenophobes. Okay, I made up the xenophobes and it only phonetically fits the A to Z pattern desired. Still. 

Yesterday's classifieds surprised me. One, that there were any at all. Second, that almost all fell under two first letters: E-ngineers and T-echnology. Not a bartender, cook or domestic help job listed at all. I'd hoped that hyperlocal jobs might be listed but no. Why the likes of Intel, Hewlett Packard, and Apple would spend any money to purchase classifieds in a newspaper with a circulation approaching the hundreds is lost to me.

Time to dive back into Craigslist and Indeed.com.