Last Friday, the Department of Labor issued its monthly jobs report for October and reported that the U.S. economy lost another 190,000 jobs in October (a number that will certainly be revised up or down in future months). October’s losses represent the 22nd straight month of monthly job losses, and unemployment rose from 9.8% to 10.2%, the highest level since 1983. Accounting for people who have given up looking for work or who want full-time work but have settled for part-time work, the unemployment rate is 17.5%. The total number of jobs lost since the Great Recession began in December of 2007 now totals 7.3 million.

There were, however, some mildly positive signs in October’s Department of Labor numbers. Hourly wages increased during the month, the number of hours worked in manufacturing rose, and temp/staffing hiring is rising. As well, the job losses in September and August were revised to show fewer job losses than initially reported. All of these statistics demonstrate that there are slight hints that the job market has bottomed out and that while recovery will likely remain anemic for months to come, we may have seen the worst. (Lest anyone get too excited, however, unemployment will likely rise for most of 2010 as monthly job losses will not only have to turn positive, they will have to turn positive to such a degree that monthly job gains actually outpace new entrants into the job market).

In any event, LinkUp’s October jobs report showed that the U.S. jobs market is improving ever so slightly. New job listings on LinkUp rose by 4% during the month and total job listings were flat from September. On a state by state basis, 33 of 50 states reported a decrease in new job listings (34 of 51 counting Washington, D.C.) and, on a slightly more positive note, 27 states showed a decrease in total job listings.

In terms of the best and worst performing states, Illinois, North Carolina, and Connecticut reported the largest increases in new and total jobs, while Massachusetts, Ohio, and West Virginia experienced the largest declines in the actual number of new and total job listings.

LinkUp, the fastest growing job search engine on the web according to recent ComScore data, only indexes job listings that are found on company websites. The October jobs report was based on a comparison between September and October job listings from 16,967 corporate websites around the U.S. As a result of this unique data source, LinkUp’s job listing data includes no duplicate job listings, no classifieds from recruiters or headhunters, and no phishing or scam ads. Even more importantly, the jobs data is based on actual job openings that companies list on their own company website rather than the openings that companies are advertising for on other job boards or in newspapers.

Not surprisingly, there’s been a ton of news of late surrounding the daily newspaper industry, but the summary of it all is that as bad as things are for the dailies, these businesses are incredibly gifted at finding new, imaginative ways to make things even worse.

• Newspaper revenues are down 29%, and papers around the country continue to crater. Freedom Communications, owner of 33 dailies (including the Orange County Register) and 70 weekly newspapers, filed for bankruptcy this week while the San Francisco Chronicle is cutting more employees. Ann Arbor lost its daily entirely, the L.A. Times is restructuring its sales force (as if that’ll help in the least), and Rupert has shuttered his free London Paper. With no attractive offers, the Austin American Statesman was taken off the block, while local investors purchased dailies in Philadelphia and bidders are emerging for the Boston Globe.

• Want to see local movie listings in the paper? Sorry.

• The debate over paid news continues to rage with more stories here and here.

• Rather than charging for online news, maybe the answer is better distribution through e-readers or ‘hyperdistribution.’

• Due to a string of bankruptcies that have placed media companies into the hands of creditors (like some cruel game of hot potato), the largest publisher in the country at the moment is….J.P. Morgan. The Banking giant now controls Readers Digest, Source Interlink Media and American Media Inc. which have combined revenue of just over $5 billion.

• Local news is a big deal these days and is being looked to as the savior for local dailies (as if it hadn’t always been). As everyone except daily newspaper publishers has known for years and years, the strategy of gutting local coverage in favor of generic AP stories and reruns from other newspapers has proved fatal for almost every local daily in the country. Now, after virtually every newspaper in the country is either on its last legs or already in bankruptcy, local news is back in favor.

• Local news is even big enough to be fueling some M&A activity. Local blog site Examiner.com has acquied NowPublic for an undisclosed sum. NowPublic raised $10.6 million last summer from lead investor Rho Ventures and seed investors Brightspark and the Working Opportunity Fund.

• Even the most dysfunctional paper in the country is seeing the local light. The Tribune Company has started a local blog network to boost its online coverage of all things local. Too little, too late, I’m sure, and they’ll undoubtedly find a way to screw it up, but at least they got the right answer eventually.

• Speaking of the most dysfunctional paper in the country, Tribune has finally sold the Cubs. Unfortuantely, only now is the greatest fraud in the industry’s final chapter receiving the scrutiny it should have from the very start.

• And finally, in the most baffling, head-scratch-inducing development over recent weeks, the same businesses that were slow to appreciate and effectively leverage the digital tsunami that swept across the industry are now letting go of the very people who have any chance of saving them.

It continues to dumbfound me how much this industry enjoys digging its own grave.

More so than any other large media company, the New York Times is doing a phenomenal service for the unemployed by prominently highlighting the job scams that prey on job seekers. Over the past few weeks, the Times has run a number of stories that describe the most common job scams and ripoff services that are thriving as job seekers become increasingly desperate in their job search. Unfortunately, most of these scams rely on pay-to-post job boards (especially high traffic ones) to lure unsuspecting job seekers by posting fake job ads.

In a New York Times story yesterday, the Arthur Group was identified as a scam headhunting firm that posted ads throughout Careerbuilder to attract and dupe its victims. That story accompanied a front page Times story that exposed ITS and Benchmark Professional Careers as bogus ‘career management’ or ‘career marketing’ companies that add little to no value for their clients yet charge absurdly high fees (paid up-front, of course). The companies, and others like them, have been sued by and banned from doing business in various states, but they still manage to survive and thrive like cockroaches.

In another Times piece from August 8th, entitled ‘Online Scammers Target The Jobless,’ Riva Richmond identifies the most common job scams that plague traditional pay-to-post job boards today. These scams include up-front payments for materials or training, links to online forms that result in identity theft, mystery shopper positions, work-from-home scams, and ‘money-mule’ or reshipper scams. In all of these cases, the scams rely on pay-to-post job boards (Geebo.com was cited as one example in the article) to find and dupe their victims.

In that article, one of the pieces of advice that Richmond offers is to use niche job boards rather than the large mega-job boards like Careerbuilder and Monster. This is decent advice and probably would eliminate a sizeable chunk of risk, but even better advice for job seekers would be to use job sites such as LinkUp that do not allow companies to post jobs directly onto the site. LinkUp is a job search engine that only lists jobs that are found on company and employer websites themselves. Equally as important, LinkUp also does not list job openings from other job boards (which carry the same risks therefore as the mega-job boards themselves), which makes LinkUp entirely unique among job search engines.

In any event, I applaud the New York Times for prominently highlighting the fraud that unfortunately afflicts a large portion of the recruitment advertising industry. I wish more people in our industry were doing more themselves to protect job seekers.

LinkUp just released a new Facebook application that allows companies to fully and effectively leverage the power of the world’s largest social network in their recruiting strategies. The app (which can be found here), called ‘Current Jobs At Our Company,’ allows companies to publish jobs from their corporate website to their company’s Facebook page. The app is easy to install and works automatically behind the scenes, requiring no additional work because the job listings on Facebook are updated automatically to reflect any changes to the jobs on the company’s website itself.

Most importantly, when a job seeker clicks on a job on Facebook, they are brought straight to that exact job listing on the company’s own website. The other critical aspect to LinkUp’s Facebook application is that it adds a specific ‘Jobs’ tab across the top of the company’s Faceebook page, so in effect companies and organizations can extend their exact corporate career portal from their company website onto Facebook.

As an aside, LinkUp is the fastest growing job search engine on the web according to Comscore data. We only index jobs that are found exclusively on company websites, and as a result, there are no garbage job listings, no phishing scam ads, no work-at-home scams, and no ads from 3rd party intermediaries. The site is update every day to reflect any changes on the company websites we index, so the jobs on LinkUp are always current. Equally as important, most companies do not advertise all of their jobs, so LinkUp contains a ton of jobs that cannot be found anywhere else on the web. And because we only index jobs from a single source (the company’s website itself), there are no duplicate job listings. Unlike other job search engines that primarily serve other job boards, LinkUp’s mission is to serve job seekers and employers. We are currently indexing over 21,000 company websites, and the site contains 392,436 jobs (as of today). Companies that choose to can run paid search campaigns on their job listings and pay for candidate traffic to their company website on a per-click basis.

LinkUp – always current, often unadvertised, and never fake.

For more details on LinkUp’s Facebook app for employers, click here.

As a continuation to yesterday’s post about Indeed, I wanted to highlight in further detail a portion of the interview with Indeed’s CEO, Paul Forster. Later in the same interview, a question was asked by Jason Alba of JibberJobber regarding Indeed’s revenue model. By far the most discerning question of the day, Jason asked, “I am curious to know about the differences in business models….Indeed isn’t making the $400 or whatever per job posting like the traditional job boards. How really do these aggregators monetize and how sustainable is this business model?”

Paul gave the following reply:

“Our model, Jason is quite correct, is not pay-per-posting. It’s actually pay-for-performance, pay-per-click. So it’s similar to the general search engines. When you advertise using Google AdWords, you’re paying per click, You’re also specifying a maximum price that you’re willing to pay per click and that’s the same with Indeed as well. So our main product is sponsored jobs and it’s a very easy product for job advertisers to use. All you have to do is specify a budget and the maximum price you’re willing to pay and that’s literally all you have to do because we’ve already got your jobs in our index and when you do that, when you sponsor them, they will appear above the organic results, highlighted in blue at the top of the results. They’ll get a tremendous boost in traffic and you don’t have to pick key words and you don’t have to post jobs because we’ve already got your jobs from your website. It’s very, very simple to do. It’s actually much easier to do than keyword advertising on the general search engines and we drive the traffic directly to the jobs on your site so it’s quite good from a branding point of view and from a cost-effectiveness point of view it’s also very, very good. So that’s our revenue model and basically all of our revenue comes from pay-per-click advertising on our site.”

While of course the answer is absolutely correct (as one would expect from a CEO), it is also extremely misleading. In reading it, it would be entirely understandable if you came away with the impression that it is employers themselves who are paying Indeed for clicks. Paul refers to his clients as ‘job advertisers,’ and one would certainly be excused for thinking that this means employers who are advertising jobs. Indeed certainly has a few employers that are running paid search campaigns directly, but this portion of Indeed’s customer base represents a tiny, tiny fraction of their customers. The vast, vast majority of advertisers running paid search campaigns on Indeed are the job boards who feed their jobs to Indeed and pay for the traffic or job seeker clicks that Indeed delivers to those job boards. The job advertisers that Paul speaks of in his answer are JOB BOARDS. Re-read Paul’s answer again with that in mind and it becomes apparent how brilliant his answer is in being truthful but entirely misleading. He has definitely got a future career in politics should he decide at some point in life to pursue one.

I am highlighting this element of Indeed’s business model not because it is wrong or flawed. The site does offer a slight benefit to some job seekers by allowing them to search hundreds of job boards through a single site. For job seekers that want to search Monster, Careerbuilder, and TheLadders, for example, and all of the other pay-to-post job boards that are filled with both real and garbage job listings, Indeed most definitely offers some convenience. And for job boards, Indeed can be a terrifically effective, less costly way for job boards to generate traffic to their site. As the traditional job boards continue to fall out of favor with both job seekers and employers, they are increasingly desperate to buy traffic wherever they can get it, and Indeed absolutely fulfills that need.

What I take issue with is the fact that both Indeed and Simplyhired pretend to be serving job seekers and employers, when in fact they are primarily serving job boards. Again, this is a perfectly acceptable and most likely a highly lucrative business model. I also believe that Indeed and Simplyhired are extremely smart to embrace a pay-per-click transaction model. Paid search is, without question, migrating into recruitment advertising faster than most would have predicted (as well it should be), and those two job aggregators are certainly helping accelerate that trend. But I believe strongly that players in the recruitment advertising space, regardless of their business model, have an obligation towards the largest and most important stakeholders in the space – job seekers and employers.

By serving up scam jobs, phishing jobs, work-at-home scams, and other garbage listings, Indeed is failing to meet their obligation to job seekers. And by publishing duplicate job listings from the hundreds of job board customers that feed their jobs to Indeed, Indeed is failing to meet their obligation to both job seekers and employers. I certainly understand that few businesses can execute their vision flawlessly, and some amount of leeway should always given, especially to start-ups that are helping, to some degree, transform an industry.

I’d grant that leeway to Indeed were it not for the fact that they are appallingly disingenuous about their business model and who their real customers are.

It’s been a very interesting past few weeks with a bunch of stories relating to the death of older news and journalism models (daily newspapers) and the emerging models that hope to replace the dailies. Below are a few of the stories that have caught my attention…

• On the old model front, Gannett has cut 1,000 more people from its payroll, and McClatchy’s efforts to restructure its massive, crippling debt load failed miserably. An extremely insightful, detailed analysis of Gannett’s debt reveals just how rapidly that company’s balance sheet has deteriorated and how perilously close to insolvency the once stalwart publisher truly is.

• Also on the old media front, USA Today shuttered ‘Open Air,’ its quarterly magazine targeting more affluent readers, and Tribune also ceased publishing its weekly Sunday magazine.

• Even smaller dailies, who had seemed somewhat immune to the travails of their big-city brethren, are feeling the impact of the web as well as the current economic meltdown. Deal activity in that segment of the media landscape is rising, and valuations present some interesting opportunities.

• Despite the grim news, there are signs that things may have bottomed and that at the current prices, certain media companies present compelling investment opportunities. Even Sam Zell appears to have found a buyer for his Cubs and Wrigley and his cable business. While below initial estimates, the fact that it might get done at all in the current environment is amazing.

• Another positive sign for the dailies is the fact that some are beginning to see returns on their investments in emerging media and technology. Even despite some embarrassing missteps and the fact that many investments are still in their very early stages, there is hope that the flurry of activity over the past few years, while perhaps too late, might have a chance in salvaging some value for the large dailies.

• Even Google is helping the cause of publishers by helping pave the way for customized news delivery.

• On a much smaller scale, some monthly magazines like Men’s Health have even figured out how to capitalize on the iPhone phenomena to create a nice little recurring revenue stream.

• One thing certain to not work for any daily paper is charging for the vast majority of its daily news content. Some will try, and perhaps one or two (NYT & WSJ) might be able to succeed at some minimal level, but the pay for content model is a death sentence for anyone else.

• A bunch of stories have sprung up recently about emerging new models for online news and journalism such as Huffington Post and Politico seeking to fill the vacuum being created by the implosion of the dailies. Debates are raging as to whether Huffington Post, in particular, is a credible, high-quality source of journalism, news, and opinion or a trashy parasite, and the arguments on both sides are both enlightening, interesting, and entertaining.

Here is the last day (finally) of cleaning out my backlog of stories relating to the dailies, traditional media, new media, advertising, etc. Some of these headlines are slightly outdated, but so be it.

• Village Voice Media is stepping in to capitalize on the opportunity completely missed by the dailies in creating a local advertising network. This may turn out to have been the biggest whiff of all the missteps of the dailies over the last decade. And while that may be arguable given how badly the dailies have handled their fortunes of late, there is no arguing that in these late innings, the creation of a local ad network (both online and offline) represents perhaps the last great hope for local newspaper franchises.

• Unfortunately, the local ad play has also taken a beating in the current downturn, so maybe it’s not the immediate fix everyone believes it to be. (Though long-term, the hype over local ad networks, local search, local media, and local advertising is more than justified). Even local TV, which has also whiffed on many of the opportunities they’ve been presented, is showing signs of innovation and change in the new media landscape.

• Online classifieds are soaring these days (as if anyone needed more evidence of how badly the dailies blew their monopoly in that arena).

• Tucson has lost its daily. And again, while some say enough with the obvious and tell me something I don’t know, the pace of death and destruction in the industry is staggering and is still worth endless commentary and observation. Anytime an industry can lose $18 billion in 3 years, it’s worth commenting on.

• …another article to add to the mix on whether or not micropayments will or won’t save the dailies. And despite the arguments against charging for content, MediaNews is forging ahead anyway.

• Some believe the Kindle won’t save the dailies either (though I’d argue that it might).

• Maybe public subsidies are the answer (even Congress is jumping on the bandwagon)…or maybe the dailies can follow the example set by the Huffington Post and start auctioning off internships and even higher level jobs on ebay.

• Also in the obvious category, the trend with the dailies over the next few years will be local billionaires and/or real estate developers buying their local daily from debt-holders. It’s already happened in San Diego, and next on the list will be Boston, L.A., and possibly even New York. (Something has to happen with the Times as it’s too valuable to be run down to zero and the Sulzberger family is eventually going to riot as their fortune continues to be decimated…). But eventually, most large metro dailies will be owned by local individuals or groups of individuals and we’ll be back to where we were 100 years ago.

As I indicated yesterday, I have a huge backlog of daily newspaper, media, and advertising news items that have accumulated over the past few weeks and am trying to get through them in as few blog posts as possible, so here’s day two of cleaning out the closet…

• McClatchy is scrambling on multiple fronts to stay ahead of the avalanche crashing down around it. The company has restructured its debt, accepting a 3x increase in the interest rate it’s paying (5% to 15%) in exchange for an extension on the debt of a few years. In the head-scratching department, the company is also experimenting with an additional charge for subscribers who want the TV Guide with their newspaper. Really?!?!?!?

• There is little doubt that the Wall Street Journal will be out front leading the charge in charging readers for its content online. This is a good thing (if done the right way), and in one form or another it will work and it will be an important component allowing certain publishers navigate towards a long-term, sustainable business model online. Circling the wagons and working out an industry-wide program might be the answer, but the dailies just need to make sure they stay out of trouble with anti-trust regulators in the process. The trick will be balancing the need to generate a decent value proposition that warrants a paid fee and the urge to maniacally police the web for ‘pirated’ content.

• Another component of that sustainable business model will be individualized news. There has been countless attempts of this, and many, many failures, but eventually publishers will figure it out and it will become a standard component of news delivery, both in print and online. The latest attempt in this effort comes from MediaNews.

• Newspapers are now less liked than airlines. According to a recent report, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, newspapers ranked below airlines and cell phone companies in customer satisfaction. That’s pretty low.

• With all the chaos swirling around newspapers, it remains an active area for deal activity. This is likely to increase as papers work through bakruptcies, consolidate, shut down, develop new models, and begin arriving at new models that provide some prospects for growth and value creation. Despite the collapse of the industry, print remains an incredibly appealing media channel for consumers and advertisers alike, and that will likely remain so for decades to come. But at some point, all the newspaper debt holders that are quickly becoming equity owners are going to realize that they have less chance of successfully managing a daily paper than industry veterans (who deserve about a D- for their effort even with an exceedingly generous curve applied to the grade) and are going to have to sell at whatever price they can muster. Debt holders who hold out hoping that good days are going to return are delusional. Selling now at $.10 on the dollar is far better than nothing down the road, no matter how painful the write-down might be today.

• The New York Times continues to experiment with new advertising formats on its site. While some may be annoying and hopefully short-lived, readers should be patient and forgiving and let the Times keep experimenting until it eventually arrives at workable solutions. If brilliant campaigns like the Mac/PC ads are any indication, the future is solid for online advertising. I also credit the Times for raising its prices. I haven’t a clue if this will work long-term, but at least they’re aggressively trying to figure out what to do with their business to stay solvent.

• What is sure not to work, however, are weak attempts to launch new publications that are aborted before issue #1 even hits the street.

• As if more evidence is needed, Pew just released a new study showing how badly newspapers dropped the ball with online classifieds. This news comes just as online employment classifieds are beginning to rise once again.

The tectonic shifts transforming the media and advertising landscape have always been fascintaing to me a stand as one of the central areas of focus of this blog. And while the earthquakes and volcanos along the fault lines are worthy of the headlines they grab, I am equally intrigued by the smaller events and more subtle (and not always so subtle) tensions that are constantly taking place as the traditional media plate gets subducted underneath the new media plate. This subduction zone seems to be generating peak activity these days (I’ll save the record-length list of story items for another post) and has now even been put to music. Mad Avenue Blues is a little long, but for anyone in the media, advertising, search, web, or tech/software business, it’s worth watching in its entirety.

(Thanks Lief for the link)

I am very curious to know if Apple is generating any revenue from app developers to promote their iPhone applications. I have to imagine that some apps are paying a large fee to be included in Apple’s full-page newspaper ads promoting the app store and the iPhone. If anyone has seen any articles or commentary on this, please post a comment.

Along those same lines, are apps paying any fees to be promoted in Apple stores? Again, the exposure for free and paid apps is extraordinary, and certainly worth a lot of money to the lucky few who are included in Apple’s prominent in-store promotion.

This is a recent picture from the Apple store on 5th avenue in New York. On a random Thursday night, there were at least 200 people in the store, and daily traffic has to be off the charts. Careerbuilder’s iPhone app is the only job board featured anywhere in the store.