After I graduated from high school in the late 1970s, I tentatively applied for a summer job at one of the two local newspapers in our California central valley town of 34,000.
To my surprise, the managing editor of one, the Daily Democrat, gave me a part-time job – not the writing job teen-me had hoped for, but delivering display advertising cut-sheets, the scissored-out full page on which an ad had appeared, to whatever small local business had placed it in the previous day’s paper.
That was how newspapers worked. A business ordered and paid for an ad, the ad department designed it, and after it ran, I made the cut-sheets, put them in large brown envelopes, and cycled around town in the summer heat, dropping them to the appropriate business.
That direct-advertising model supported the existence of two dailies in a small town, each with reporting, editing and advertising teams and,…
