How often do you look at the newspaper's classified ad section?

An area of the Classified Ad Department, probably in the 1970s.

Discussions about what is causing the changes to The Mobile Press Register and other newspapers often focus on news content and overlook the changes to advertising, particularly classified advertising.

Classified ads until 1995 were the cash cow of the newspaper business. Classifieds were enormously profitable for the Press Register and all other newspapers.

If you were looking for a job, you searched the classified ads. If you ran a business and wanted to hire someone, you placed a help-wanted ad. Real estate and car dealers were the biggest buyers of classified ads. Garage sales, auto parts, used cars, farm equipment, furniture, pets, cameras, property rentals—practically anyone who had anything to sell placed a classified ad.

Many people spent Sunday mornings leisurely looking through the small type of the newspaper’s classified ads just for the sheer entertainment value of seeing all the stuff for sale.

All that started to change in 1995 with Craigslist, the free online classified service, and eBay, an online, consumer-to-consumer auction and shopping website. Newspapers started losing readers searching for new jobs to HotJobs, started in 1996, and Monster, started in 1999. Now you can go online and find a job or camera lens anywhere in the world, not just in your newspaper’s circulation area.

Today, there are people in their 20s who have no idea what a newspaper classified ad is. And newspaper classified ad departments, which used to occupy large areas of a newspaper building, barely exist.

How often do you look at the newspaper's classified ad section?

Changing jobs for $3 more a week

In the first two decades of the 20^th century, salaries were so low at The Mobile Register and most other newspapers that employees would often pick up and move to a paper in another city for a few extra dollars a week.

Perkins J. Prewitt, on the right in the above photo, left the Register in 1916 for The Birmingham News because he was offered $3 more a week. Prewitt may have left because he was unhappy with his situation in Mobile. In July 1916, Prewitt, who had been serving as the state editor of the Register, was transferred to its sister paper, The Mobile Item, as its telegraph editor. In Birmingham he became an editor on the News and a member of the Loafers' Club, a men's literary group.

Pictured with Prewitt on the left is Edgar Valentine Smith, the News copy editor and another member of the Loafers' Club. Smith was also a writer and playwright and his short story "Prelude" won the O. Henry Prize in 1923.

Moving from newspaper to newspaper didn’t leave time for making friendships outside the newspaper. The Register often developed camaraderie as family. That occurred in part because they spent so much time together putting out the paper, and in part because they might have no other family.

This Battle House, built in 1906,

was only 10 years old when Prewitt

worked at The Mobile Register.

men and women who worked on the

Those who worked on the nightside of the Register often continued their time together by going to

breakfast at the Battle House Hotel after work, Prewitt once noted. Or they used part of their day time to go sailing together on Mobile Bay.

Hand compositors struggled against the machine age

Press Register Linotype operators

Digital production and delivery of the news are not the first technological advances to wipe out jobs that had a long tradition of being part of The Mobile Register and newspapering.

From the time Register first set up shop in 1821 until the 1890s, the newspaper’s type had been set by

hand. By the late 1800s, several shifts of compositors sat at type cases 20 hours out of every 24, “and hereRegister told its readers.

Hand compositor sets type on a 'stick'
 Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

the ceaseless click of the busy type, as it drops in the ‘stick’... makes a ceaseless scene of industry and active business life” the

Typesetting became mechanized when the Register installed six Linotypes early in July 1893. The average hand compositor set about 700 lines of type on a 10-hour shift. A Linotype operator could produce about 2,500 lines of type on an eight-hour shift.

A Linotype machine cost about $3,000 to buy or could be rented for about $500 a year. The operator set the type by means of a keyboard similar to a typewriter. The machine cast lines of type on a metal slug that it automatically justified and then assembled the individual lines of type on a galley.

Press Register Linotype room 1940s

The increased speed of composition afforded by a Linotype meant a reduction in the number of hours the compositors had to put in to set up the newspaper. Increased output also meant that fewer typesetters were needed and some were laid off.

One group of hand compositors thrown out of work joined together to publish a rival newspaper, The Daily Herald. But hand composition then, like the way of publishing and delivering a printed newspaper today, was doomed.

Do you remember these newsroom folks?

The above photo was taken in The Mobile Press Register newsroom sometime between 1979 and the early 1980s. I remember the names of most of the people. From left, Lynette Stegall (can’t make out the man behind her), Mignon Kilday, Sybil Wright, John Sellers, clerk name unknown, Ben Rapport, Mark Kent, Ralph Poore, Kenny Morgan, woman unknown, and Royce Harrison. I don’t know the name of the man seated in the slot, nor do I remember the occasion for the photo. Note the metal squirt can on the desk. Anyone remember what they were used for? Hint: It didn’t hold oil for lubrication.

Battle of Mobile Bay brings the Civil War to the Register's backyard

Battle of Mobile Bay, 5 August 1864 (1890), by Xanthus Russell Smith. The monitor ships are CSS Tennessee (left), shown surrendering, and USS Chickasaw (foreground). Admiral Farragut's USS Hartford is right
 and USS Winnebago, left.

The Mobile Register reported in its edition of Aug. 3, 1864, that 23 Union warships had gathered in the Gulf of Mexico off the entrance to Mobile Bay. This buildup of warships indicated a pending attack.

Register owner John Forsyth confidently wrote that forts Morgan and Gaines at the mouth of the bay, the Confederate bay fleet and other defenses would send the federal ships to the bottom.

On Aug. 5, 1864, Union Rear Adm. David G. Farragut steamed past Fort Morgan and into history as he damned the torpedoes and captured lower Mobile Bay.

Farragut and Captain Percival Drayton standing by the wheels
of a Dahlgren howitzer on the quarter deck of the squadron flagship,
USS Hartford, 1864. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph.

In series of editorials about the action, Forsyth sharply criticized Lt. Col. John K. Williams of Mobile for the surrender of tiny Fort Powell, which guarded Grant’s Pass in the Mississippi Sound. Forsyth called the minor action in the battle for the bay a “disgraceful surrender.” 

The article so offended Williams that he sent Forsyth a letter “as usually precedes a challenge.” But Williams accepted a follow-up article as an apology from Forsyth and the editor was not forced to defend himself on the field of honor.

Union forces were content to control the bay for the time. Mobile would continue under the Confederacy for another eight months. But the end of the war was becoming increasingly obvious, although Forsyth and the Register would not surrender until forced to do so.

When The Mobile Register printed on paper made from okra

Ruins of the paper mill that made paper from okra plants.
The Mobile Register printed at least one edition on this paper.

Around 1868, Willis Gaylord Clark retired as an owner of The Mobile Register.

In 1852, Clark, a native of New York, had been a 24-year-old lawyer in the office of Campbell & Chandler and editor of The Southern Magazine. He served as a leader in Mobile’s Whig Party and for a time edited The Mobile Advertiser.

During the Civil War, the Advertiser and the Register merged under the ownership of Clark and John Forsyth.

A successful Mobile politician, businessman, author and newspaperman, Clark also served as a trustee of the University of Alabama. The university’s Clark Hall is named in his honor.

After leaving the Register, Clark turned to making paper at his mill in Beaver Meadows in northern Mobile County. For a time, the mill experimented with making newsprint from the fiber of the okra plant. The Register satisfactorily printed at least one edition of the newspaper on paper made from okra plants in Clark's mill.

Paper can be made from almost any plant fiber. Using agricultural plants such as okra, however, creates tremendous problems of supply, transportation and storage of the plants for processing. Large amounts of land also are needed to grow the okra. Eventually, tree fiber proved much more practical and economical.

The photos in this post show all that was left of Clark’s paper mill in the late 1980s.

Know Any Newsboys From the 1920s or '30s?

"There are a number of these young
newsboys in the Alabama cities"

In October 1914, socialist photographer Lewis Hine brought his camera to Mobile and took the photos of the newsboys on this post. The photos are from the Library of Congress

Until about the mid-1800s, The Mobile Register and most other newspapers didn’t sell the paper by the individual copy. In fact, in the 1830s the Register forbid its carriers from selling copies of the paper on the street or to deliver them to anyone other than regular subscribers.

The reason for this was simple. Newspapers needed to budget on a regular income and they could do that only with readers who usually paid in advance for a year’s subscription. And an individual paper cost too much for most people on the street to afford.

"One of Mobile's young newsboys
who begins work at daybreak."

There is no general history of Mobile newspaper boys, also called newsboys and newsies. Newspapers in big Eastern cities used newsboys first, but generally the Register and other small-city dailies used boys as street vendors about the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century.

The newsboys weren’t employees of the newspapers. They bought papers from the publishers and sold them as independent agents. Because they were not allowed to return unsold papers, the newsboys often worked late to hawk every last copy.

"7-year-old Ferris. Tiny newsie who did not
know enough to make change for investigator.
There are too many of these little ones
in the larger cities." The paper is The Mobile Item.

In 1899, New York City newsboys went on a two-week strike to get a better deal from Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Morning Journal. Strikes weren't limited to big cities. Newsies struck in Butte, Montana, in 1914, and in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1920.

With unemployment growing in the late 1920s, men began replacing boys as paper carriers. The 350 street vendors for Mobile’s two competing newspapers, The Mobile Register and The Mobile Press, jostled one another for space on the city’s street corners. The conflicts sometimes became violent as the carriers burned bundles of their competitor’s newspapers and overturned delivery trucks.

"Newsboy."

Major changes were in store for newspaper carriers after World War II, but that is a topic for another post.

Do you know anyone who was a newsboy in the 1920s or '30s? How did he like it?