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.