You may remember the hubbub surrounding Maine’s career centers and the possibility of a couple of them shutting down about a year ago. Many people thought it was a bad idea to close job centers at a time when the economy was beginning to show signs of faltering.

I too thought Maine’s job centers were a pivotal, irreplaceable resource for the unemployed. That is, until I became jobless myself.

I’ve been out of the news business since January. To explain briefly, I had been part of the newspaper covering the Lakes Region for seven years and just wanted to try something different. So, I made the “small step for (this) man” and am glad I did. While the transition has been harder than I thought, I believe everyone needs a little shake-up every once in a while.

After a long-postponed knee surgery and a lengthy period of recuperation, I started looking for a job in May. My first source of job listings was local newspapers, this one and others that Current Publishing owns as well as the Portland Press Herald.

The last time I used the classified section to find a job was when I lived in Dallas in 1997. The Dallas Morning News, which I digested every night because I didn’t have TV, was chock full of job postings, a job-hunter’s dream. The News’ Sunday classified edition was literally an inch thick, with all sorts of jobs listed. Everyone I met out there told me it was the go-to source for employers trying to find employees. They were right, and it helped me find decent work.

So, 10 years later and fresh on the job-hunting scene again, my first thought was to turn to the local newspapers in and around Portland for postings. What I found, to no fault of the newspaper companies, was truly anemic classified sections. And a resulting dead end.

In the years between my job searches, things had obviously changed. Was the Internet taking over, I wondered? I knew about several jobs sites the Web offered so my next step was to check jobsinme.com. I was happy to find more jobs listed there and I applied to many. My problem, I realized later, was that I was applying for jobs that were posted weeks or even months before. Some other applicant had already snagged the positions that appealed to me. Another dead end.

It was then I put down my hypothetical guns and took some advice from my brother to try out the Portland Career Center, run by the state of Maine. Not being of the socialist or communist mindset, I bristled at the thought of the government helping me find a job. But I’m glad I went. They didn’t help me get a job but the experience opened my eyes.

It was after visiting the career center in the Bayside neighborhood of Portland that I understood why the classified section and Internet weren’t working for me, and presumably other job seekers: The government, through these dozen or so job centers spread throughout Maine, had taken over the “classifieds” business. Whereas in Dallas, where the Morning News was the main source for job postings, the new jobs clearinghouse in Maine is the government.

I ended up getting a job and am proud to say I did it without the help of the government. But the experience made me even more nervous about our nanny state taking over roles that private companies can do, and have done, just as well. With newspapers struggling to stay afloat, the classified section is a key to their income. But with the establishment and apparent domination of these career centers, many employers are now turning to the state of Maine to advertise their open positions, rather than their local newspaper.

If we want to save newspapers and all the information they provide, then a good start would be to get the state out of the job referral business. Taxpayers would save money. Newspapers would see improved cash flow. Indeed, the convenient classified section would once again be the popular place to go for employers and employees, as it always was.

John Balentine, of Windham, is the former editor of the Lakes Region Weekly

and The Suburban News.