Weekend read: Journalism, economy better or worse?

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Items you don't want to have missed:

"The State of the News Media 2011" (Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism): In its latest findings on the news industry, Pew says things are looking up a bit: revenue is recovering somewhat and layoffs have lessened. But Pew detects "a more fundamental challenge to journalism": that with each iteration of technology, "a new layer of complexity" is added that moves the industry farther from controlling its own destiny and shifts revenue to others.

"Newspaper Ad Sales Hit 25-Year Low in 2010" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter continues to track the unraveling of the traditional revenue model at newspapers. Last year, he says, ad sales hit a total reminiscent of 1985; what's more, that number was down by half from the all-time high seen just five years ago. The bright spot: 2010's drop was "the least worse" decline in the five-year period.

Musical interlude: A theme song, perhaps, for publishers and their revenue goals.

"What James O'Keefe Knows about Media (and You Should Too)" (Poynter): Poynter's Steve Myers takes a look at what he calls the "entrapment journalism" of James O'Keefe -- using reductio ad absurdum to catch institutions (Planned Parenthood, ACORN, NPR) in uncompromising positions. "Whatever we call this surreptitiously recorded audio and video," says Myers, "...[w]e should think about what this work is, where it fits in the media landscape, and why it gets attention."

Video interlude -- if you have an hour and a half to kill in the name of long-form journalism.

"The Forgotten Millions" (New York Times): "Why doesn't Washington care?" asks op-ed writer Paul Krugman as he runs the numbers on the long-term unemployed. Lawmakers seem more interested in cutting the deficit than in helping Americans get back work, he says, partly because the economy now is "suffering from low hiring, not high firing."

But here's a tale from one of the "forgotten millions" that Congress should listen to, as chronicled on the website Over 50 and Out of Work:


Elizabeth Zima from Over Fifty and Out of Work on Vimeo.

Economy's improvement in eye of beholder

The friendly folks at the state Labor Department sent a letter my way that offers this encouraging assessment: that I have been unemployed for so long (nearly, gulp, 20 months) that "your prospects for finding work in your customary occupation are classified as 'not good'." (Sigh!)

The boldface, which is theirs, then continues to inform me that I now must look for suitable work, which is defined as anything else I could do using the skills from my former occupation or anything else at all that I could do no matter my training or lack of training, as long as whatever comes up in the crap shoot pays "at least 80 percent of your high quarter base period wages."

I vaguely recall that language from somewhere deep in my then-new unemployment insurance booklet, which I dutifully read eons ago. At the time, of course, I knew that it never would apply to ME, since I was a well-educated careerist who had climbed the ranks in my profession and would land in a new job tout de suite.

But -- oops! -- it was indeed meant for me.

So you'll understand the agita that resulted today from a couple of news snippets I caught:

1. The monthly jobs report;
2. A discussion of corporate profits.

The U.S. Labor Department this morning reported an improved employment picture in February, with the nonfarm payroll number up (+192,000) and the unemployment rate down (8.9%). According to the New York Times, the recovery is gaining traction, even if the 64.2 percent of working-age adults in a job or looking for one "is the lowest labor force participation rate in 25 years, an indication that many Americans are waiting for hiring to get better before resuming the job hunt."

Then there was this piece of an interview I caught this morning on CNBC with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. If you skip to about 4:03, you'll hear an exchange between Greenspan and Steve Liesman, the network's senior economics reporter:



"Corporations are as profitable as they've ever been," says Liesman showing a chart indicating after-tax corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic purchases. "How bad can business conditions really be, given how much corporations are earning these days?" he asks Greenspan.

The former chairman offers a long, considered, Greenspan-esque response, but then adds: "I grant you your point ... there's no question that profits are doing exceptionally well."

"But," he goes on, "you can still have very considerable profitability and not be willing to invest it in illiquid assets."  Um, like what, new workers?

Lying, analyzing, breaking up: Read!

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For your rest-of-the-weekend reading pleasure:

"Newspaper Execs: Still Denying, Still Crying and Still Lying to Themselves" (SimsBlog): Judy Sims, once an executive with the Toronto Star Media Group, writes about the same old same old she sees in mainstream media: "very smart people repeatedly do remarkably dumb things, killing their businesses in the process." The Internet is a disrupter, she says, and because history shows that disrupters eventually win, news execs need to convince themselves that

... their survival rests on becoming of the Internet, not merely residing on the Internet. That means becoming a platform. That means being open. The Internet is not just another content distribution method. It is social. It is collaborative. That means accepting that they are no longer publishers or broadcasters having a one-way “Gutenberg era” conversation with the masses.

Instead, newspapers talk about finding ways -- through pay walls, iPads, subscription models -- to re-create the scarcity they enjoyed until recently. "It’s a colossal waste of time," says Sims.

"‘Objective’ Journalism is Over. Let’s Move on." (Reflections of a Newsosaur): More and more it seems, the calls grow louder to shift away from some of the old conventions of journalism: Make journalists disclose any financial, political or other interests they might have in what they write, and allow them to show their own expertise/informed opinion in their work. The argument for both is that readers are better served: in the former, they're forewarned of any biases; in the latter, they benefit from years of accumulated knowledge in subject areas.

Music interlude.

"Analysing Data Is the Future for Journalists, Says Tim Berners-Lee" (The Guardian): Journalists may be more than scribes nowadays -- many can shoot video and many can code websites -- but among the most essential skills going forward will be mining data sets to find stories, says Berners-Lee. The Freedom of Information Law may be a journalist's best friend, but once you have access to reams of government data, can you make sense of them? That's where database skills come into play, a course of study few present-day journalists have mastered.

"Breaking up with Hotmail" (Slate): In this clever piece, Jack Shafer writes about his "promiscuous relationships" with various e-mail services as you suspect he would about women he has dated: some were easy to get along with, some were more difficult. And while Hotmail once had his eye, now it's Gmail:

Who do you think you're fooling, Hotmail? We all know you're the same broad we met back in 1996.

Lightning-round reads:

• "Financial Times Proves Better Read than Dead" (Crain's New York Business): The salmon-colored financial paper's "stick-to-its-knitting strategy" (staying niche) seems to have kept the big bad Murdoch machine at bay.
• "Unemployed, and Likely to Stay That Way" (New York Times): One badge of dishonor for the Great Recession is a record number of people out of work for longer periods of time. Could that be creating a new permanent "idle class" of unemployed in the U.S.?
• "Remember when Newspapers Gave Bonuses around the Holidays?" (Poynter): Here's a new money-saving idea: recalculate the formula for vacation time to the company's advantage.

Bonus video: This was where you landed from a link in the provocative tweet "Did you hug a journalist today?"

Victims of recession now pawns for Congress?

Over 50 and Out of Work Trailer from Over Fifty and Out of Work on Vimeo.

As expected, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives today blocked approval of a three-month extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, which could affect some 2 million people by the end of the year.

Too bad members of the House didn't take the time to view some of the video stories on the website Over 50 and Out of Work, which offers heart-wrenching accounts by baby boomers displaced by the Great Recession. The trailer above introduces some of those affected, who talk more fully in individual interviews about their careers and how they became unemployed.

These are just regular folks -- your neighbor next door, an uncle, a woman at church -- who were whacked as the economy nosedived. Their stories are yours, too, if you share their label of long-term unemployed -- jobless for six months or longer. Worse, about a third of the 14.6 million Americans unemployed as of the second quarter this year had been jobless for a year or longer, according to the government.

In the videos, you'll meet Stan in Detroit, out of work since January 2009. He spent his career in manufacturing and was asked to retire from his job as an engineer when auto-parts maker Delphi Corp. stumbled. He figures the recession has hit him financially to the tune of about $500,000. Bob, on Long Island, worked in the financial services industry, pricing credit vehicles like bonds. Out of work since March 2009, he says his wife worries that he'll never work again -- as he does, too. Brian and Jessica were on the West Coast; he kept losing jobs in various fields as companies were acquired or faltered. When he landed with banking giant Washington Mutual, he figured he was set -- until it failed. The couple moved East and now live with Jessica's father.

The emotions are just below the surface for these recession victims: They seem embarrassed to be where they are and scared of where they may be headed. I hope they (we) aren't further victimized by a lame duck Congress using the extension of unemployment benefits as a political football.

Jobseekers vs. openings still out of whack

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics this week released its latest JOLTS data (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey), and as always the Economic Policy Institute was ready with its own analysis (and graph, above).

According to the BLS, the ratio of unemployed persons to available jobs was 5-to-1 in September, slightly weaker than in August (4.8-to-1), but better than the ratio seen when the recession ended in June 2009 (5.8-to-1). Since July 2009, though, the number of job openings has increased 25 percent, says the BLS, to 2.9 million in September.

But hiring levels have remained anemic. (JOLTS, released monthly, looks at job openings, hires and separations -- quits and involuntary -- on the last business day of each month.) According to the BLS, September saw 4.2 million hires, up 9 percent since the recession ended but below the level of 5.0 million hires when the recession began in December 2007.

The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, says the latest JOLTS report shows the same "stalling out" in the economy that has characterized other labor market data since earlier this year.

Then the EPI adds this twist: "if we were to include not just the 14.8 million unemployed workers, but also the 9.5 million 'involuntarily part-time' workers -- part-time workers who want and are available for a full-time job, and are therefore likely job searching -- the ratio would be 8.3-to-1."

Criminy!

EPI also uses the JOLTS release to draw attention to the planned Nov. 30 expiration of long-term unemployment benefits, and calls on Congress to extend them through 2011.

Record number of jobless at year-plus

Here's a startling statistic: Nearly a third of the people listed as unemployed in the second quarter had been jobless for a year or longer. That was 30.9 percent of the 14.6 million then listed as unemployed, or about 4.5 million people.

The numbers are in an October report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that says the number of long-term unemployed had "increased sharply" since the December 2007 start of the Great Recession. (The recession was declared officially over in June 2009.)

In fact, the report says, the share of the labor force jobless for a year or longer reached a record high in the quarter.

It's common that when the Labor Department puts out its monthly report on employment, the number of so-called long-term unemployed, or those jobless for more than six months, is broken out. But the report doesn't usually go more granular, to detail specific numbers in the two long-term categories (27-51 weeks, 52+ weeks).

That is in the new BLS report. What's more, it also shows how significant the run-up in the year-plus ranks of the unemployed has been: from 9.5 percent of the jobless population in Q2 2007 to nearly 31 percent in the same quarter this year.

A new monthly report on employment is due tomorrow morning. Bloomberg News is predicting the unemployment rate for October will remain at 9.6 percent, as it has been for the previous two months. More of the same isn't encouraging, and was cited yesterday by the Federal Reserve as one reason it had decided to embark on purchasing $600 billion in long-term Treasury bonds to try to jump-start the economy.

FRIDAY UPDATE: The government did indeed report an unemployment rate of 9.6 percent for October, and put the number of long-term unemployed (total at 27 weeks or more) at 6.2 million for the month.

Do unemployed need 'Fairy Jobmother'? Yes, says reality TV.

Shoot! Another casting call missed. How'd that happen?

All I needed was to have been out of work for awhile and to have lost all hope of having a career. A financial setback probably would have earned me a few points, too.

Piece of cake for any of us 6.1 million Americans felled by the Great Recession and classified as "long-term unemployed" (out of work six months or longer) by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Really, though, I hope the participants in Lifetime's new "Fairy Jobmother" get something more out of the cable TV reality show than their 15 minutes of fame. (Even this season's recession-themed "The Apprentice" promised face time with real executives.)

The official website for "Fairy Jobmother" is a bit thin: very basic job-search and résumé-writing tips; clothing advice from the winner of Lifetime's Season 7 "Project Runway" (cross-promotion alert!); and a couple of lame-sounding "Career Kick Start Boot Camps" attended by series star Hayley Taylor that seem to offer the same tips as the website.

The events, scheduled in Los Angeles and New York City a few days before the series airs Oct. 28, suggest attendees can "Interview with a Lifetime rep," but then offer this fine print:

"This is not an offer for employment, permanent or temporary, but an offer to participate in an interview process for consideration for a three-month paid freelance job opportunity subject to Lifetime’s applicant and hiring review process. Lifetime is an equal opportunity employer."

To which I say: Huh?

Both the show and Taylor are imports from Britain, where "Fairy Jobmother" is popular. (Here's a YouTube review from a perky Brit who likens the show to "Supernanny" for the unemployed.) Lifetime has ordered eight hour-long episodes.

The cable network describes Taylor as a stay-at-home mom who started offering career advice to others as a volunteer, then parlayed that into a reality show. Points for gumption, eh fellow job hunters?

Feel better? Great Recession has ended

Way back when, in a more innocent time, "The Dating Game" was one of the oh-so-nearly-risqué game shows produced for network television by Chuck Barris.

And every time I hear mention of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee, I think of the show, because of the clever "Dating Game" treatment Fortune magazine gave the group -- complete with iconic daisy graphics -- in a 2001 story explaining its complex work.

So the show's peppy theme song came to mind this week when the news broke that the committee finally had put an end date on the Great Recession: June 2009.

Yes, it took the panel more than a year to assess when the economy began to rebound, just as it took until late 2008 for the group to set the start of the recession at December 2007. Why the lag? A Q&A explains. (And if you really want to make your eyes bleed, click on the Excel spreadsheet on the committee's main page to read all the numeric details.)

But that doesn't mean we're back to boom times.

Coincidentally on the same day the Great Recession was put to bed, the New York Times ran another story in its excellent series "The New Poor," through which it has been detailing the downturn's personal toll. Remember that among the country's 14.9 million unemployed are more than 6.2 million who have been out of work longer than six months. And at the current average of just 82,000 new jobs created monthly, it will take awhile to get all of them (us) back to work.

Yet things are beginning to feel different now than they did during the dark days of 2009: more listings on job boards, the promise of more holiday temp hiring, a decline in "mass" layoffs (50 workers or more).

And I was lucky this week in landing two preliminary job interviews, after what seemed like many months of near misses. (I couldn't even finagle a ticket into an invitation-only journalism job fair.) Fingers crossed, I might soon be able to put an end date on my own personal downturn.

Labor Day weekend reading

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It's a three-day weekend, so there's more time for reading. Here, with a Labor Day theme, are some gems:

"Most 'Re-employed' Workers Say They're Overqualified for Their New Job" (Pew Research Center): The folks at Pew have come up with some interesting statistics in this national survey, conducted in May and released on Thursday:

• A quarter of the U.S. labor force -- or 36 million of the 139 million currently employed -- faced unemployment at least once during the recession that began in December 2007.
• A third of those cut loose from jobs during the recession received a pink slip more than once; 16 percent found themselves out of work three or more times.
• Only 4 in 10 of those who found a new job say they're earning more now than in their former position; just 28 percent say their current benefits are better.
• More than half of the newly re-employed say their household is worse off financially than before the recession; 35 percent say they've had to make "major changes" in lifestyle.
• A quarter of the re-employed went from full-time jobs to part-time ones.
• While out of work, 6 in 10 of the re-employed thought about switching fields; 4 in 10 considered relocating to an area where jobs seemed more plentiful.

The survey's release preceded by a day the government's report on the U.S. labor picture for August, which showed a slight uptick in the jobless rate, to 9.6 percent. The number of long-term unemployed (six months or more) declined in August, to 6.2 million from 6.5 million, or about 42 percent of the jobless, vs. almost 45 percent in July. The median time unemployed also dropped, to just under 20 weeks, from nearly 23 weeks in July. (Incidentally, the payroll category that includes print journalists -- so-called publishing/except Internet -- saw a slight gain in jobs: to 761,600 in August from 761,300 the month before.)

"Warning: Why Cheaper Money Won't Mean More Jobs" (Talking Points Memo): The political blog featured a post by Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor secretary, that throws cold water on the idea that getting money into the hands of consumers and small businesses will grease the wheels of the economy. Neither is in a position to borrow, no matter how cheap the money may be, Reich says. Only large companies would benefit if the Fed made money cheaper, and "they're already sitting on mountains of money." As a result, he says,

If Bernanke and company make it even cheaper to borrow, they'll be subsidizing a third corporate strategy for creating more profits but fewer jobs -- mergers and acquisitions.

And we all know that M&As usually seek economies of scale that endanger jobs.

Labor Day video interlude No. 1.

"What the Spot.Us Community Thinks of Objectivity" (MediaShift IdeaLab): There seems to be a lot of discussion of late as to whether reporters ought to routinely include a kind of confessional sidebar to the stories they write, to alert readers to viewpoints and experiences that might color their work. (Honestly, though, the talk isn't all that new.) Spot.Us, the website that allows reporters to pitch story ideas for funding, surveyed its "community" -- supporters and funders -- to see where they stood on objectivity in journalism.

Nearly 45 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement that "objectivity is possible but difficult," but almost 28 percent said they believed "transparency is the new objectivity." Said one respondent about the latter, "... reporters ought to reveal their biases in each story as part of the narrative so as to partially disarm whatever criticism of bias they may receive. Doing so will provide a better service to the public and will create better journalism."

Be sure to read the smattering of comments from respondents at the end. They're pretty interesting.

"A Journalist Laughs at the Thought that his Layoff Anniversary Is Worth a Story, But..." (Poynter Online): Broadcaster Michael Goldfarb interviews himself about his layoff five years ago from public radio station WBUR in Boston and the slow rebuilding of his professional life as a freelance journalist and author. His conclusion: "I commit as much journalism today as I ever did" -- but he now earns 50 percent less doing it.

Labor Day video interlude No. 2.

"All the Men That's Fit to Print" (The NYTPicker): In case you missed it, a discussion of gender inequality in the obituary pages of the New York Times, by the internal blog that keeps a critical eye on the paper. Interestingly, a Google search turned up a posting to an online version of a Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying (2003) article, "Gender Discrimination after Death," by Robin D. Moremen, that cites numerous academic studies, dating from 1977, that looked at newspaper obituary pages to determine whether men received "greater public recognition after death than women." The answer, not surprisingly, was yes: more obituaries, longer obituaries and obituaries usually accompanied by a photograph.

More weekend reading

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Set aside time this weekend for these worthwhile reads:

"Analysis: Why did 1.2 million U.S. workers leave job force?" (Reuters): The U.S. Department of Labor today posted job statistics for July that showed nonfarm payroll falling by 131,000, but -- as occurred in June too -- the unemployment rate not bouncing higher. One possible explanation is that more people are moving to the sidelines, discouraged after many months of looking and so giving up their search. According to Reuters, the labor force participation rate "dropped to 64.6 percent in July, matching the lowest level since 1985." Remember that the ratio of jobless worker to available opening is still close to 5-to-1.

And speaking of the long-term unemployed:

"99 weeks later, jobless have only desperation" (New York Times): Left in the cold when unemployment benefits were extended in July were people who already had claimed as many weeks of benefits as is currently allowed: 99. Although there have been attempts to change that maximum, the concern now is the growing deficit -- matched by a growing belief that the longer the benefits, the greater the disincentive to search for work. But as the Times story recounts, for the 99ers, "The last vestiges of their former working-class or middle-class lives are gone; it is inescapable now that they are indigent."

"Hard times working the Patch" (Media Nation blog): Dan Kennedy, assistant professor at the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston (and no relation to me), publishes on his blog an email he received from a local editor at Patch, the fast-growing network of online community news sites owned by AOL. Just as Associated Content (now owned by Yahoo) and Demand Media (which today filed its long-expected prospectus to sell stock to the public) are seen as experiments in revenue-generation in journalism, so too is Patch, which helps put in business individuals interested in reporting on their towns and neighborhoods. AC and Demand have been criticized for their pay models; Patch for its one-guy-does-it-all design. The email confirms that work at what might be the next iteration of local-news coverage can be all-consuming: "Basically, the job is 24/7 with so far little support in getting any kind of time off."

"For Communication grads, a tough job market" (Project for Excellence in Journalism): Each year, the University of Georgia surveys journalism and mass communication graduates to see how they're doing in the real world, and the picture for the Class of 2009 was downright ugly: just over half of the graduates were able to find full-time work in a year's time, a record low in the history of the 24-year-old study. And if not getting a job was bad, worse still was the lower salaries and benefit seen by those who did land a job, the study said.

Finally, there's this gem, which I was alerted to via Twitter the other day:

"The Confessions of Bob Greene" (Esquire, from 2003): It's a loooooooong article about the fall of the former Chicago Tribune columnist. Tweeting a link to it was longform.org, a group that loves "great long-form reads" and a product it thinks displays them well. I can't speak for the product, but the article is worth every minute of your time.