Job Outlook

The first two months of 2012 showed that the number of jobs posted to mediabistro.com was about steady with last year.

A reminder that this only counts the jobs posted and makes no judgment as to the type of jobs or quality.

Anecdotally we’ll say that PR and marketing jobs, plus anything to do with social media, have greatly increased in quantity, while journalism jobs are fewer and farther between.

We do see quite a number of job openings in TV journalism as well as at online-only operations, usually those covering “soft” subjects like fashion or celebrities.

But PR and marketing is definitely taking the lead.

We only wish that the numbers didn’t imply that 2012 was going to be the same as 2011—because even though 2011 was a decent year for media jobs, there are still not nearly enough to go around.

If you’ve dreamed of turning out long-form essays or investigative pieces—exactly the type of writing that “nobody reads” these days, take hope.

First, the problem: According to bit.ly and Longreads founder Mark Armstrong, the average half-life of a bit.ly URL is three hours. In other words, after three hours, a link shortened by bit.ly and shared on Twitter is going to receive half the clicks it will ever get.

In comes Read It Later, which Armstrong describes as a “time-shifting app” (and in a sense, it is).

Armstrong writes: “Time-shifting could be the ‘takeout bag’—or the dinner plate, or the refrigerator. You get the idea. The simple logic is this: Give a user the opportunity to save something, and they will have access to it for a longer period of time, increasing the odds over time that they will eventually consume it. This will occur at the time and place of their choosing…Not only that, but once they consume it, they will share it at the time they complete it, and they will have effectively extended the half-life of that particular URL on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. It’s a new long tail for the post-SEO world.”

And they’re extending the half-life by a long shot: Read It Later users keep content an average of 96 hours in their queue before marking it read. That’s a 32x increase from that piece of content’s original impact.

He finishes: “This, the digital equivalent of a takeout bag, may just help us rethink how we value content on the web. And for publishers, it can help us rethink what we create.”

What do you think?

Badly, it seems.

While this sort of stilted, all-caps exchange would have captivated gamers in the ’90s, today’s gamers demand more sophisticated storylines and dialogue. Tista Games, the self-styled “HBO of Games” (because of the company’s episodic products, a brilliant concept) says it’s seeking writers who can create “long storylines and depth of character. We’re going to have a need for writers to come in and give us content that we can then package into a game.”

See the full MediabistroTV interview below.

Claims for unemployment benefits by the newly-laid off held steady last week at 351,000, the Labor Department announced.

That’s still a four-year low.

This caused the four-week moving average, which smooths out fluctuations, to drop 7,000 to 359,000.

“It’s broadly in line with recent U.S. data showing a gradually improving economic backdrop,” Omer Esiner, a market analyst, told Reuters.

For the week ended Feb. 4, the most recent week data were available, 7.5 million people were collecting some form of unemployment assistance, a decrease of 178,000 from the prior week and more than 1.5 million fewer people than a year ago.

That included 3.9 million receiving regular unemployment benefits, 113,000 fewer than the previous week, and 2.9 million on emergency unemployment compensation, an 83,000 decrease from the prior week.

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

That’s where ghostwriting comes in.

PaidContent reports that the ghostwriting industry is booming. One consultant launched Gotham Ghostwriters in 2008 as a “one-stop shop for executives, consultants and others looking for a book to burnish their reputation.” Last year, the company took in $700,000 of revenue on 11 book projects and seven book proposals.

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.

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.