Business Notes: 'It's Classified' Weekly Paper Halts Print Shifts to Web - Valley News

Newspapers, it’s no secret, are facing challenges. Readers and advertising are shifting online, leaving print increasingly looking like a quaint relic from a bygone era.

So it will not be surprising to many that It’s Classified, the weekly newspaper of classified advertisements that has been distributed for free around the Upper Valley, announced that the Jan. 11 edition was its last printed issue.

“This is a hard time to be a small business. It is an especially hard time for print publications,” Rebecca (Becca) Mallary, managing editor of It’s Classified, wrote in a letter to readers in the final edition.

“The price tags of printing and delivery continue to grow. As a print publication we just can’t sustain the cost of being in print any longer,” she added.

It’s Classified was founded in 1989 by Becca Mallary’s parents, the late novelist Francis (Fanny) Mallary and her former husband, Peter Mallary, a well-known Vermont Democratic politician who served three terms in the Vermont House. (The Mallarys also ran the now-defunct Bradford, Vt., monthly, Behind the Times.)

Stacks of the advertiser were dropped off every Friday at more than 150 business locations in the Upper Valley and featured a compendium of classified ads under such headings as antiques and collectibles, horses, trailers and tack, pets and livestock, snowmobiles, and real estate rentals.

There were even personals.

At its peak, It’s Classified carried 32 pages of ads, Becca Mallary wrote, and published nearly 1,500 issues over its 29-year history.

The final issue contained seven pages of ads and a back page with a photo collage of Becca Mallary and her parents over the years.

“This truly is the end of an era,” Becca Mallary wrote in the final edition. “The end of a chapter in a story about community, and family, and a quirky little paper filled with artwork, originality, and heart that has woven us all together for so long.”

But perhaps the beginning of an era, too. Like so much these days, It’s Classified will live on in cyberspace.

“After an overwhelming positive response to the idea on our social media accounts,” Becca Mallary wrote, It’s Classified will continue “as an online publication for the time being” and “migrate as much of our print content online as we can,” including the business directory, community events calendar and movie listings.

In fact, It’s Classified has long been committed to the web, launching an online version only two years after the start of Facebook and a year before Netflix began streaming movies.

Fanny Mallary was “a realist,” Becca Mallary wrote of her mother, who had long served as the managing editor of the advertiser before she died at age 62 in 2017.

“She saw the writing on the wall about the internet and what it would mean for a business like ours long before most ... (and) would have thought fighting the rising tide of the internet ... was Sisyphean.”

But even though It’s Classified now has gone 100 percent digital — classified ads can be written and submitted through its website — and its physical offices in the Bradford Academy building have closed, those preferring the old-fashioned way still have an option.

Forms to submit handwritten ads can be printed from the It’s Classified website and then left in a drop box of the lobby of Bradford Academy, Becca Mallary wrote.

Lebanon’s Creative Lighting Designs Shifts Business Model, Moves to Rivermill

Creative Lighting Designs, the lighting design, showroom and home décor firm run by Brian Horan, is moving from its home on Miracle Mile to the Rivermill Commercial Center on Mechanic Street in Lebanon at the end of January.

It’s the second storefront retailer of lighting fixtures and lamps to go dark after Illuminations in Glen Road Plaza in West Lebanon closed last March.

Horan, who originally opened his firm in 2005 in Quechee before relocating it to Lebanon in 2009, said he is shifting his business model away from a traditional retail storefront to focus on custom-designing home and commercial lighting systems for clients.

“Just as we’ve seen Macy’s and other recognized brands close their largest locations, it is time for us to rethink our own business model and go in the direction that best serves our family and community,” Moran said.

Although there still will be a showroom at the new Rivermill location, Horan henceforth will be available only by appointment and no longer retailing lighting systems, lamps and fans.

Instead, designing lighting systems “now will be the main focus of what I do.”

Horan’s move follows the closing of his neighbor in the building, Cabinetry Concepts and Surface Solutions, after owner Ro Wyman wound down her firm after 10 years in business.

Hirsch’s Building in Lebanon Has New Owner

Ed Hirsch, whose family ran the Lebanon apparel store Hirsch’s for nearly 70 years before closing the retail end of the business in 2016, has sold his Hanover Street building to Sam Altaf, the former owner of United Flooring in the Miracle Mile shopping plaza in Lebanon.

Hirsch said he’ll use his home office to continue supplying uniforms, footwear and other work apparel to fire and emergency departments, universities and businesses, which he has been focusing on since shutting the retail end of the business.

Altaf, of West Lebanon, described his purchase of the building as an “investment” and plans “to preserve its value as an old landmark for downtown Lebanon.”

He said that exterior renovations will begin in the summer but interior renovations are beginning this winter to prepare Hirsch’s former retail space for a new commercial tenant.

The sale of the building was handled by Chip Brown of BCR Brown Commercial Realty in Hanover.

Orford Post Office Sold To St. Louis Investor

Another well-known building, the post office on Route 10 in Orford, has been sold to an out-of-state investor who specializes in acquiring postal properties.

St. Louis-based Postal Building and Leasing Co. bought the 1,400-square-foot building from brothers Andy and Joseph Jones for $189,000, according to commercial broker Jim Ward of Equity Group Real Estate Brokers in Portsmouth, N.H., who represented the sellers in the transaction.

The picturesque red brick building in the center of the village was built by the Jones brothers’ father in 1962.

Ward said plans call for the post office to continue to occupy the property, even though ownership has changed hands.

Postal Building and Leasing Co. is headed by Keith Barket, a prominent St. Louis real estate investor and developer.

News items of interest to the local business community are published in the Business & Money section of the Sunday Valley News. Submissions may be sent by email to: biznotes@vnews.com (high-resolution photographs may be attached in .jpg format).

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