Employment classifieds: Help wanted ... desperately

Newspaper executives, watching their readership steadily decline, have long consoled themselves by pointing to the greater fragmentation of broadcast. "At least we're not doing as badly as TV!"

All the while they've envied the greater rate increases television has been able to command, mind you.

As the term 'mass media' becomes an anachronism, metro dailies have fancied themselves the tallest midget. Maybe the daily no longer reaches a majority of the local audience, but it continues to be the largest single buy in most markets.

Along with this rationalization has been a snobbish belief that the newspaper reaches the agenda-setting portion of society, the decision-makers who matter. But what if the people who consume the content aren't the ones who look at the ads?

That's perhaps the most troubling aspect of a new, disturbing study from The Media Audit, prepared by International Demographics, Inc., a Texas company with 1,700 media and agency customers.

"Readership of newspaper classified ads in 67 metro markets surveyed by The Media Audit declined more than 11 percent in three years and more than 25 percent of those who regularly read employment ads do so on the Web," says their release.

That's a double-whammy as newspapers last year watched classified ad revenue plummet — especially the employment category, which in many cases was down 50%. Falling revenue combined with falling readership does not a pretty picture make.

Pointing out that classified produces as much as 40 percent of a newspaper's revenue, the survey finds that in 1998 13.2 percent of respondents said they read newspaper classified advertising regularly. By 2000 that percentage had fallen to 11.7. "That's an 11.4 percent drop in just three years," Bob Jordan, co-chairman of The Media Audit, said in the survey's press release.

"It appears to us that it is the newspaper's employment/recruitment classified advertising that is under the most competitive pressure," Jordan said. "The alternative press; shoppers, city and regional publications, have been nibbling away at the newspaper classified market for several years, but now the Internet employment sites are rapidly capturing significant market share also."

In 67 markets with a population of 118.4 million, 3.4 percent (3.9 million people) visit Web classified job sites regularly. Some 9.6 percent (11.3 million people) read newspaper employment ads regularly. "No one could possibly see good news for newspapers in these numbers," Jordan said.

What the numbers show, Jordan believes, is that the newspaper industry which invented the classified ad business and owned it for decades has now lost 25 percent of its recruitment advertising audience.

So are those lost print readers looking for jobs on newspaper Web sites instead?

The survey says: 35 percent of regular readers of employment ads in daily newspaper classified sections are also regular visitors to employment Web sites on the Internet. Only 41 percent of regular visitors to employment Web sites on the Internet are regular readers of employment ads in newspaper classified sections. Jordan concluded: "ost people are searching employment ads in one medium or the other, not both."

No news here? Try this: it's lower-income people still looking at print job ads, not that agenda-setting elite most likely to be interested in the daily's front page.

The study found that, again quoting from the press release, "households with incomes of less than $25,000 are more than twice as likely to search for employment opportunities in the newspaper. Of those searching newspaper employment ads, 16 percent have household incomes of less than $25,000. That figure is 7.2 percent on the Web."

Of course, some people saw this coming, and moved aggressively.