The Chicago Tribune on Monday announced it will make a daring move – beginning Jan. 22 it will overhaul its print help-wanted ads, becoming one of the first large daily metros to try and push those classifieds to online, all while keeping its more lucrative Sunday job listings section intact on the print side.
Currently, the help-wanted ads are in the classified section of the paper, but beginning next week the paper will only list the position, company, location and Web identification in the print version, an attempt to drive readers online to find more information about listings at CareerBuilder.com, which is owned by the Tribune Company.
These new “QuickFind” listings will not run in the classified section on a daily basis, as help-wanted ads currently do, but will instead appear in the Business section on Tuesdays only. The Business Section will also carry real estate, auto and other classifieds, and on Tuesday it will expand by three or four pages, Editor & Publisher reported.
“We needed to radically retool print,” Ellen Glassberg, director of recruitment advertising at the Chicago Tribune, told E&P. “We needed an aggressive response and to tie it very closely to online.”
On Sundays, for its CareerBuilder section, the Tribune will use a four-column ad format instead of agate listings, and pricing will be based on ad size. The paper expects the section to be a third larger. The help-wanted ads on Sundays will list job title, location, contact information, Web ID and space for some text to keep a uniform look, according to E&P.
Glassberg told E&P that most help-wanted ads run in Sunday's paper, and a company will now get a listing in Tuesday's paper for the same price as a Sunday ad.

