Why Newspaper Job Ads are Dead pt. 1: A Local Perspective

Growing up in Wisconsin as a child of the 70's and 80's there are three things I didn't think I would see in my lifetime:
1. The Packers going and wining a Superbowl
2. The Wisconsin Badgers winning a Rose Bowl
3. Employment advertising in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel shrink to almost nothing.

I started selling employment ads in 1995 right as the internet was beginning it's assault on world culture.
I went to work for my first internet job board in 1997 and continued as a direct part of that industry until 2010 and as an indirect participant since then.
In all that time I saw the classified employment ads go from a 60 page section (or sometimes bigger) on Sundays to something that barely covers three pages today.

"It's the paper, and there will always be a segment of the population (mostly older) who are not connected to the internet that will use the paper and that group will still have some members that companies need to reach so it will always be around," is what I thought until about 2005.
As long as there are newspapers there will be employment classified ads.
What I didn't expect that their decline would be as fast as it has been.

What was the cause of the decline?
In one word: Internet.
In three words: Mobile Job Platforms
In more detail...that is a subject for another article.

Thanks for reading!
Ev
A Heck of A Nice Guy