Job Outlook

Everyone needs a book of their own these days to be considered a thought leader, and everybody wants to be a thought leader.

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The company takes a 15% cut on each contract and helps its freelance authors navigate the business side of ghostwriting. It is currently seeking an intern.

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Jobless claims last week fell to 348,000, breaking the milestone of 350,000 that economists say means a recovery is around the corner.

Claims haven’t been this low since 2008.

Economists had predicted claims would rise to 365,000.

To temper this good news we remind you that the weekly claims data is affected by volatility, and it remains to be seen whether the four-week moving average will continue to fall (though it has been falling fairly steadily for some time).

Also, for the week ended Jan. 31, there were still 7.6 million people receiving unemployment benefits.

We’ve posted about the Society of Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) salary survey of freelance business journalists before and commenters have (rightly) taken us to task about the survey’s small sample size.

Now the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism has conducted its own survey. It spoke to 300 business journalists by phone, who worked in print, broadcast, wire and online newsrooms, and freelancers.

The majority of those surveyed said their salaries had either risen or stayed the same in the past two years. Wire business journalists reported the highest median salaries, at $75,000, followed by broadcast at $56,000, online at $51,000, and print at $49,375. Freelancers made an average of just $486 less at $48,899.

Medians obviously don’t tell the whole story, but we’re happy to see that freelancers reported salaries that are not astonishingly low, as they were reported in the first SABEW survey in 2010.

Nearly a third (32 percent) said their newsrooms were hiring (presumably this doesn’t apply to freelancers), up from 14 percent in 2011. Hooray!

Jobless claims last week fell to 358,000, (one of) the lowest levels in months, the Labor Department reported.

The four-week moving average, which smooths out seasonal fluctuations, fell to 366,250, nearly a four-year low.

“It not only validates the gains that we had last month … but it shows that we are likely to add to those gains in a meaningful way in February,” Millan Mulraine, senior macro strategist at TD Securities in New York, told Reuters.

Meanwhile, the picture is only somewhat less rosy for those receiving continuing claims: for the week of January 16-20, 4 million Americans were receiving regular unemployment checks from their states, about half a million fewer than a year ago, and 2.98 were receiving emergency unemployment benefits, about one million fewer than last year.

The good news this morning (economy added almost a quarter-million jobs last month!) doesn’t, it seems, extend to the media market.

As we mentioned, the industries that added the most jobs were hospitality, health care, retail, and office temps.

Doesn’t give too much data about how PR people, marketers, ad pros and journalists are faring, though obviously anecdotal evidence suggests that we don’t have the most opportunities out there.

We’re trying to get slightly more scientific. As regular readers know, about three times a week, we look at the number of jobs posted on four media job boards. Here’s what the month of January’s looked like on mediabistro’s OWN job board, in terms of how many jobs are posted on any given day.

As you can see, 2010 was a pretty bad year (as expected—it was the height of the recession), but while the rest of the economy has continued to heal through 2011 and into 2012, with the unemployment rate falling just as much as it did from 2010 to 2011, the media industry, at least judging by this metric, is stagnant.

Hopefully we’ll see more jobs for media pros soon. But it does seem like we’re not catching up like everyone else.

The unemployment rate fell more than predicted and the economy added more jobs than expected in January, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today.

Employment increased by 243,000, with gains mostly in hospitality, health care, retail and office temps, and the unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent.

While this seems like good news on the face of it, there’s still a long journey to recovery ahead. There were still 5.5 million long-term unemployed (and the longer you are unemployed the harder it is to get re-employed), 8.2 million underemployed, and 2.8 million who were not working but were not counted as unemployed because they hadn’t looked for a job in the past four weeks.

Still, the numbers of long-term unemployed and discouraged workers hadn’t significantly increased over the past year, and remain much the same.

The economy has added about 2 million jobs over the past year.

According to Romenesko and a tipster of his, the AP has let go 10 staffers, including three bureau chiefs, two assistant bureau chiefs, two in AP images, entertainment reporter Rosalie Fox, and a photo editor.

The AP is also killing its premium personal finance wire, but reassigning the five staffers who worked on it, a separate tipster said.

According to the Tennessee Ticket blog, one of the AP staffers affected was Bill Poovey, the only AP Chattanooga correspondent.

Today the AP also announced that it is reinstating its internship programs after a one-year hiatus. When the news service initially announced the yearlong break, some didn’t believe the internships would ever return, so chalk one up for small victories.

The week ended Jan. 28 saw new jobless claims fall more than expected—by 12,000 to 367,000, a level very near to what is considered growth by many economists.

The Labor Department announced today that roughly 7.6 million people were receiving continuing benefits or emergency extended benefits the week of Jan. 14, 1.7 million fewer people than were receiving benefits the same time a year ago.

Speaking of tomorrow’s Labor Department release of January jobs figures, economist Christopher Low told Reuters that today’s jobless claims figure “certainly suggests we will continue to see job growth at the higher end of the recent range (which has been between) 100,000 to 200,000.”

However, other analysts, including the CBO, have said that the unemployment rate may remain above 8 percent until 2014, so it may be too early to break out the champagne.

Small businesses drove most of the growth, adding 95,000 jobs, mostly in the service sector, payroll giant ADP said today.

Overall, the economy added 170,000 jobs in the private sector, a smaller increase than the increase in December (which was revised downward to 292,000) but fairly well in line with the job gains over the past six months or so.

The slowdown may be explained by the “purge effect,” which we mentioned last month—basically, it’s an accounting glitch that may explain why the December numbers were so (artificially) high.

The official Labor Department report, due Friday, is expected to show a 145,000 gain and an unemployment rate of 8.5 percent.

After falling two weeks ago to the lowest level since April 2008, claims last week sprung back up to 377,000, the Labor Department announced today.

This is exactly what’s been happening over the past month or so: claims fall to ridiculously low levels (lowest in 3.5 years!) and then spring back up.

The overall trend, however, has been one of improvement since September 2011, with the four-week moving average, which smooths out volatility, steadily declining from 422,000 or so to 380,000.

“The job-market recovery remains on track,” Scott Brown, an economist who forecast claims would rise to 380,000, told Bloomberg. “The underlying trend is moderately low layoffs. We certainly have seen a lot volatility in the week to week numbers.”

Unlike last week, no state’s data was estimated, a labor official told Reuters.