Job Outlook

The New Orleans Times-Picayune is losing a large chunk of its staff and may cease daily publication, the New York Times reported late last night.

Owner Advance Publications/Newhouse Newspapers may be following the Ann Arbor model, in which it transformed the Ann Arbor News from a print to a primarily web-focused publication, cutting staff in the process.

Editor Jim Amoss is said to be leaving after assisting with the transition. Also departing will be managing editors Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea.

Gambit, a local NOLA weekly, has more from shocked employees: “All employees with whom Gambit spoke — even longtime senior writers and editors — said they learned of their fates from The New York Times report….’I had to find this out by Twitter,’ said [a reporter]. ‘Do I go in to the office tomorrow? Do I even have a job to go in to tomorrow? I don’t know. No one has called me. No one has said anything.’”

Also according to Gambit, the layoffs are likely to target at least 50 reporters, bringing the newsroom staff down by one third. The remainder will likely take salary cuts and become bloggers.

If the Times-Picayune owners are truly emulating the Ann Arbor model, the cuts are likely to be deeper than just those 50. When the Ann Arbor News closed, about 10 percent of the 274 employees got jobs at the new AnnArbor.com.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Name a reporter at USA Today with a powerful brand–a columnist or blogger you follow.

You probably can’t, says Jay Rosen. “USA Today has always been an editor’s paper—very digestible news is the big idea—not a home for writers or a school for sensibility.” But new president and publisher Larry Kramer says that that time is over.

“We really can’t survive if all we do is commodity journalism. We have to do things that… we say things differently, we help people understand things,” he told Howard Kurtz on CNN. “I’d like us to be more complete and more outspoken in several areas, including stories about the impact of actions by government and business,” he told Politico’s Dylan Byers. ” “What we need here is what we haven’t had before — a lot of strong voices…Here, it was just the USA Today brand by definition…” he told Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman.

He also said that he plans to hire “unique voices”–Kramer’s way of adding value in a supersaturated media landscape. Rosen says the thought is good, but: “Overthrowing that approach isn’t as simple as hiring a few bloggers or loosening the rules for writers. We’re talking about ideological change within an occupation that sees itself as having no ideology. That’s… tricky. And there’s no guarantee that people who excelled at the old way will be any good at the new.”

USA Today announced another round of furloughs last month, the fourth in four years. Parent company Gannett Co. is still profitable, but its profits have fallen far and its revenue has declined for five straight years.

By nature, even the coolest jobs start losing their luster the day you start them. So how do you learn to re-love a gig once the honeymoon is over?

Tactic No. 1: Do something different. ”Become an elastic band. Push yourself to take on new assignments and gain some extra skills,” said Mark Swartz, senior career columnist for Monster Canada. “Be part of something bigger.”

“Know what you love and think about how to incorporate this aspect into your work,” said career coach and corporate trainer Carin Rockind. “Adding these passions will make you like your workplace and the rest of your job more.”

For five more ways that will help you go from hating to loving your job, read 6 Ways To Love The Job You Have.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

Well, the numbers are in and they do not look good. Are they better than stats from March? Yeah but they’re not exactly great. The April job report reflected a creation of 115,000 jobs and indicated the unemployment rate decreased from 8.2 percent to 8.1.

According to CNBC, although it may seem like jobs have been created, the number of discouraged employees increased from 865,000 to 968,000 — that’s an increase of 12 percent! Plus, people working on a part-time basis increased by 18,000. It wasn’t clear if this was in lieu of full-time work or if people re-entered the workforce from retirement, let’s say, to earn some extra cash.

What can we make of these numbers? Not to sound too grim but um, it’s indeed weak. Peter Morici, economist at the University of Maryland, told CNBC, “In the weakest recovery since the Great Depression, more than four-fiths of the reduction in unemployment has been accomplished by a dropping adult labor force participation rate — essentially persuading adults they don’t need a job, or the job they could find is not worth having.”

Although long-term unemployment slightened a little last month, at least numbers are headed in the right direction. Americans out of a job for more than 27 weeks decreased to 5.3 million to 5.1 and the average timeframe for unemployment decreased to 39.1 weeks.

Numbers, schmumbers — are they helpful? Perhaps for a macro view on the economy but when it comes right down to it, nothing can replace a job search than hard work, networking, and a ton of perseverance, numbers and all.

The United States economy added 120,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate remained little changed at 8.2 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said today.

The gains were in manufacturing (+37,000), food and drink (+37,000) and health care (+26,000). Temporary help services added no jobs over the month.

The 8.2 percent unemployment rate does not include 7.7 million people working part-time because they couldn’t find a full-time job or 2.4 million “marginally attached” unemployed people, who are not counted as unemployed because, for various reasons, they did not search for a job in March.

The number of long-term unemployed, 5.3 million, didn’t change, and still makes up 42 percent of the unemployed.

The only reason that 351,000 weekly unemployment claims is not a four-year low is because claims hit 351,000 just once last month (before temporarily rising again).

But yeah. Four-year low. The week ended Feb. 25, the most recent week data were available, seven million Americans were receiving unemployment checks (the 351,000 figure just refers to the people who are newly filing).

This is good and bad. The fact that so few people are filing new unemployment claims (and 351,000 does really count as “few”) means that the layoffs have finally stopped. The fact that seven million people are receiving unemployment checks, not to mention the millions of people who are unemployed but aren’t getting checks, means that hiring hasn’t picked up again yet. But the Federal Reserve said it expected the jobless rate to “gradually” decline, according to Reuters.

Let’s hope.

As usual, here are eleven new jobs culled from the mediabistro.com board as well as other sources across the web. Enjoy!

Journalism jobs:
assistant editor (Washington, DC)
food critic (Culver City, CA)
deputy editor (Middletown, RI)
police/court reporter (Ann Arbor, MI)
Marketing/PR jobs:
pr/marketing intern (New York, NY)
marketing specialist (Cambridge, MA)
social media junior associate (Washington, DC)
bilingual (English-Spanish) consumer marketing manager (Orlando, FL)
Graphic design/art jobs:
graphic designer (New York, NY)
Publishing jobs:
digital production manager (New York, NY)
Other jobs:
web developer, online publications (New York, NY)

Every day we scour major job boards, including, but not limited to Mediabistro.com’s listings, to find the best media jobs out there. We screen out duplicates and scams so you know you’re only receiving the top choices.

As of the time of this posting, there were 1495 jobs on our board.

The economy added 227,000 jobs, beating analysts’ expectations, even as the unemployment rate remained steady at 8.3 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today.

The unemployment rate has fallen eight tenths of a percent since August 2011.

The biggest job gains were for temps (+45,000), health care (+61,000), and restaurants and bars (+41,000). Government employment was essentially unchanged, the Bureau said.

The numbers for December and January were revised upwards to show an extra 60,000 jobs were added in those months.

Update: We forgot our usual Temperance of Good News With More Numbers. As you are surely aware, while 8.3 percent unemployment is a (relatively) lovely number, it doesn’t count the 8.1 million people working part-time because they couldn’t find a full-time job and the 2.6 million people who were not working but not counted as unemployed because they hadn’t looked for a job in the past four weeks. That is all.

It couldn’t last forever–the long string of weeks wherein fewer people filed for unemployment than the week prior has ended, with jobless claims inching up 8,000 to 362,000 last week.

The four-week moving average was 355,000, an increase of 250 from the prior week.

But the slight setback hasn’t dampened optimism for tomorrow’s unemployment report; economists are predicting at least 200,000 jobs were added in the month of February, which fits quite nicely with ADP’s report from yesterday.

The total number of people receiving unemployment benefits continued to decline in the week ended Feb. 18, the most recent week data are available. About 7.3 million Americans were receiving some form of benefits, down more than 111,000 from the week before.

Payroll giant ADP is saying that the private-sector economy added 216,000 jobs in the month of February, according to its latest National Employment Report.

The biggest increases were at small businesses—defined by ADP as those with fewer than 50 workers—where payrolls increased by 108,000. Medium businesses (50-499 workers) added 88,000 jobs.

ADP only tracks payrolls in the private sector; government hiring probably won’t affect employment numbers that much as payrolls in the public sector have been mostly flat the last few months. But the full report will be out Friday.