NEWSPAPER PERSONAL ADS THREATENED BY WEB, RADIO

By: Randy Dotinga LA Times, Seattle Papers Dump Matchmaking Ads



When 34-year-old Lisa M. was in the mood for love, she used to pick up
The Buffalo (N.Y.) News and peruse the voice-mail
personal ads. If she liked one, she'd call a 900-number and pay for the
privilege of hearing a message from a would-be Romeo.



But now Lisa has placed an ad of her own - 'Cute Redhead ISO Real Man'
- on AOL's sprawling personal-ad Web site. On the Internet, Lisa can
show her picture to potential dates and look at theirs. She can chat
with men online and read their own detailed descriptions of themselves.
She can even search for a specific type of man.



And it's all free. 'I don't even look at the ads in the paper anymore,'
Lisa says.



Love seekers like Lisa are giving nightmares to newspaper classified
managers. She and thousands of other romantically inclined Americans
are flocking to the Internet and leaving behind voice-mail personal
ads, once a sure source of easy revenue at alternative and mainstream
newspapers. Dozens of newspapers are scrambling to stop the
bloodletting, while some have abandoned their personal sections
entirely.



It's a far cry from the heyday of voice-mail personals that came just a
few years after they were invented. Personal ads had been a fixture of
newspaper classified sections - particularly the alternatives - for
decades. Then in the late 1980s, something new came into the world of
SWFs and SBMs - voice mail and 900-number technology.



Voice-mail personals typically work like this: Newspaper readers place
ads and outgoing voice-mail messages for free. Those who respond must
pay a fee, typically $2 a minute, to listen to outgoing voice mail
messages and leave responses of their own with their home phone
numbers. By the mid-1990s, many large mainstream dailies devoted
multiple pages twice a week to voice-mail personals. The sections had
names like 'Dateline,' 'Possibilities,' and 'Getting Together.'



Major newspapers, including The Washington Post and The
Boston Globe, even tried to capitalize on the changing times by
including special sections for seniors and gays and lesbians. The
San Diego Union-Tribune, however, relegated gay ads to a section
called 'Seeking Just a Friend,' while the city's alternative weekly
banned them entirely.



First growth; then swift halt



Personal-ad income at newspapers grew about 15% a year in the mid-

1990s, says David Dinnage, president of Boston-based Tele-Publishing
International, which provides personal-ad services to 250 mainstream
dailies and weeklies in the U.S. But the growth came to a swift halt a
few years ago. 'We were seeing some slippage even before there was any
obvious loss to the Internet,' says Jack Williams, vice president of
business development for Gannett Co. Inc. of Arlington, Va.



As a result of lost revenue, newspapers cut promotions for their
personal-ad sections. The income decline 'became a bit of a self-

fulfilling spiral,' says Dinnage, who believes the Internet is only
partly responsible for the revenue drop.



A big part of the problem is increased competition from radio stations,
which jumped into the voice-mail personals market a few years ago, he
says. Dinnage estimates that voice-mail personal ads are being offered
by a third of the top-rated radio stations in major markets.



And the Internet certainly didn't help matters. The online personal-ad
business has exploded, with AOL, Yahoo!, and Excite leading the way.
Online personal ads are typically much longer than those in newspapers
and often include photographs. Excite has 230,000 ads on its free
service, which now offers users a chance to hear each other speak in
'talking personals.'



Figures for AOL's personal-ad service are not available, but they may
be even higher. A recent check of AOL's service (http://www.love.com)
found 2,506 men seeking women in St. Louis alone. Planetout.com,
meanwhile, has cornered a chunk of the gay personal-ad market.



Some papers give up, others hang in there



Faced with a decrease in revenue, the Los Angeles Times and the
jointly operated Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer recently
dumped their voice-mail personal-ad sections. 'We had people calling up
concerned [when the section disappeared], but we weren't deluged,' says
Nancy Wyen, classified call-center manager with the Seattle papers. 'We
might consider bringing it back, but at this point it's not a
priority.'



Not all newspapers are abandoning voice-mail personals. While Gannett
has noticed declining profits, Williams says he is not aware of any
papers in the chain that have dropped personal-ad sections.



At the Chicago Tribune, voice-mail personal ads still run three
times a week - twice on two tabloid-sized pages and once on a
broadsheet page. 'We are breaking even,' says Vicki Liepelt, classified
telemarketing manager. 'It may not be a great big profit boom, but
nevertheless it's covering the cost of the paper and ink. We chose to
go ahead and keep it.' The income from the ads has definitely slipped
since it peaked in 1996, says Liepelt, a decline she attributes to the
Internet.



On the West Coast, the jointly operated San Francisco
Chronicle/Examiner are trying to revive their 10-year-old personal
ad sections by creating excitement for users, says classified
operations supervisor Tonia Robinson. Classified managers noticed a
decline in revenue about two years ago, she says. Since then, the
newspapers, which now run 250 to 300 ads in two-page sections on
Sundays, have held singles parties and sponsored giveaways of tickets,
dinners, and compact discs.



The papers will soon split gay and lesbian ads into their own section
which will run on a different day, Robinson says. The newspapers have
also been promoting a tie-in with a Web site, people2people.com, run by
Tele-Publishing International.



Partnerships with sites like people2people.com may be the key to
survival for newspaper personal-ad sections, Dinnage says. His
company's clients include Newsday of Long Island, N.Y., the New
York Daily News and the Tampa (Fla.) Tribune.
People2people.com claims to have more than one million members. It is
free to join, but users must pay about $1.30 each time they respond to
an ad.



While many of its online competitors are free, Dinnage says his service
offers advantages. 'There is a quality difference,' he says. 'Nobody is
on our service without their e-mail being verified. You can't have
people throwing stuff up there for yuks. And everything is screened for
appropriate content.' Some of the free online personals services claim
to screen all their ads, but others only respond to complaints about
content.



Dinnage's company hopes that newspapers will reap benefits by
automatically reprinting people2people.com's ads in their print
personals sections. A newspaper could choose to reprint all ads or just
one category, like the wildly profitable ads of young women seeking
men. 'We can set it anyway we want,' he says.



Tele-Publishing is also rolling out a system that will allow Internet
users to hear audio files of the people who respond by telephone to
their ads in the newspaper. 'That's the first step toward integration
of online and print,' Dinnage says. 'Being able to hear somebody speak
is a very valuable thing.'



Only time will tell if the Lisa M.'s of the world will agree.