Classifieds information

It's hard to emphasise just how important the newspaper classifieds were. If the telegraph was the nineteenth century Internet then the morning newspaper was the eBay of its day.

The paper acted as conduit for folk to exchange products and services, to find love or find a lost puppy.

There's a little bit of those other sections that finds itself again in the classifieds. I've seen magazines that are principally ads for cars for sale. It doesn't seem to matter that this is going to go out of utility faster than fashion and current affairs; once the vehicle's sold, there's no more to be said.

Perhaps magazines have an expectation of durability beyond that of the newsletter and so we don't expect to find ones designed for obsolescence. Trade journals and academic journals don't particularly hope for this since they want return for their investment and neither a model of commerce nor a theoretical model are of much use if they are replaced before they can meet that benchmark.

• Help wanted
• Work wanted
• For lease
• Adult services
• Massage
• Lost and Found
• Firewood
• Garage sale
• Auction
• Death notices
• Engagement
• In memoriam
• Funeral
• Accommodation
• Public Notices

As is the fashion

I'm the blogger that forgot fashion (as opposed to..), unlike the world of publication, which absolutely thrives on it. Newspapers have swept in every era, fashion fills in whole sections of magazines and whole sections of newsagencies, trade journals display an array of style-directed content and newsletters keep the salon pumping. And fashion is studied from every angle.

What's my zine?

Where newspapers will cater to lifestyles and interests by either lumping them in with diverse others so that you can skip to that article on computer simulation , or suprise you by including a feature virtual reality when it's not the sort of thing they're known to run;  magazines give it to you on a plate. There are general knowledge magazines that emulate the scatter gun approach of the newspaper but there are many more that go straight to the area of interest.

Magazines don't just have interviews, sometimes they signal their inclusion in the title. In specialist fields, they still declare the presence of interviews.

If an artist has enough significance, there'll be a magazine either about them or a movement they've inspired.

Magazines aren't interested in usurping the role of other media; where they may have set the groundwork for much of what appears on reality TV, they're just as happy either producing their own variations on different gardening methods or conditions as they are piggybacking on shows like Burke's Backyard or Gardening Australia. The former's magazine incarnation kept going long after the television program had finished.

And if your enthusiasm is for a niche like box kites, magazines may just have had a go. Obviously it's trickier veering from a dependable formula such as evinced in Taste of Home because, after all, even box kite enthusiasts may not wish to purchase a publication about the subject on a bi-monthly basis.

This is typically where zines have come in; produced out of a passion or enthusiasm for something, teenagers in garages not playing in a band may have been busy writing about one.

Newsletters are happy to indulge their readers' proclivities and may do so at the individual business level. Trade journals naturally deal with lifestyle interests through the industries that support them and academic journals take an interest in their studies.

Overlooking lifestyle

I was going to move straight to the classifieds without acknowledging that newspapers traditionally gave so much more bang for your buck. The Internet generation might think this is their way of clawing back readership but, in fact, they were the first to run specialist columns on the panoply of interests: gardening, cooking, dining out, travel, bridge, concerts and gigs, plays.

Indeed, while we've said that sport takes precedence over the arts, the weekend newspaper at least has long had a pullout literary and visual art section that contains book reviews, album reviews, live reviews, theatre reviews, film reviews; art reviews, television reviews..not to mention interviews with the artistes and articles about every endeavour that is either popular or potentially interesting to the weekend reader.