How We Used To Get Jobs: A Newspaper Classifieds Story
A personal reflection on the evolution of job hunting, contrasting the author's experience finding a career-defining role via newspaper classifieds with modern digital archives. The author uses his own career history to explore the intersection of memory and digital record-keeping.
Why it matters
It highlights the shift in labor market dynamics and the role of technology in preserving personal and professional history.
David Friedman 11 Aug 2026 4 min read Share I can smell the newsprint. Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash One of my first big personal successes in my career was way back in 2000, when I became Polo Ralph Lauren’s in-house photographer. It was my second staff photography job, the first one being at Christie’s auction house. Polo offered me twice what I was making at Christie’s, and accepting the position was a no-brainer. It felt great as a young photographer who’d only been in New York for a few years to have found myself in what seemed like a dream job.
But looking back, one of the most interesting things about it was how I found this dream job, through a relic of an earlier time: a classified listing in the newspaper.
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