Continuing yesterday’s post about LinkUp’s encouraging jobs data for August (in which 49 states reported an increase from July in the total number of job listings), there is equally encouraging news on an industry by industry basis. In August, 35 of 37 industries showed an increase from July in the total number of job listings on LinkUp. In terms of new job listings posted during the month, 23 sectors showed an increase from July.

LinkUp is the fastest growing job search engine on the web, indexing jobs exclusively from company websites (16,000 company websites in July). LinkUp’s index is updated every night, and does not include any job postings from other job boards. As a result, LinkUp jobs are always current, often unadvertised anywhere else on the web, and contain no duplicate listings, fake jobs, work at home scams, or other bogus jobs.

Consulting & Freelance, Insurance, and Intern positions showed the largest percentage increase in new job listings from July, while Healthcare, General Management & Business, and Administrative & Clerical showed the largest increase in the number of new job listings.

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.

Since LinkUp launched its Facebook app last week, I’ve spent more time than usual looking at the ways in which companies are leveraging Facebook (and social media in general) in their recruiting efforts. There are some outstanding examples of best practices and companies are really doing some amazing things. One such company is Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, who have an excellent Fan page on Facebook that is clearly a valuable component of their recruiting and talent acquisition efforts. I will admit up front that Hyatt just installed LinkUp’s Facebook app (which allows them to pull jobs from their corporate website onto their Facebook page), so while my views are most definitely biased, I think anyone looking objectively at what Hyatt is doing on Facebook would agree that they stand as a perfect case study for some important best practices.

Hyatt’s Facebook page is branded with a ‘HyattCareers’ URL, making it easy to find, the page has 8,509 fans, and there is a ton of content throughout the page. Most importantly, there is a real dialogue going on between job seekers and people within Hyatt. Comments from job seekers posted to Hyatt’s wall are answered individually in a timely manner with thorough, thoughtful replies. While most answers direct people to www.ExploreHyatt.jobs, there is usually some personalization in the answer, providing an indication that the comments are actually being read by someone who is interested in engaging with Hyatt’s fans, customers, and potential job candidates.

In terms of job listings (which are powered by LinkUp’s Facebook app ‘Current Jobs at Our Company’), Hyatt lists 968 jobs from their company career portal on their Facebook page. These jobs appear in a widget on their Wall, as well as on a separate jobs tab across the top. This makes it easy for fans and job seekers to find current opportunities at Hyatt from throughout their hotel and resort network, and each and every job listing links directly to that specific position on Hyatt’s career page where job seekers can apply for jobs straight into Hyatt’s applicant tracking system (ATS).

There is no doubt that social media is the hottest topic in recruiting these days, and Hyatt’s Facebook page perfectly demonstrates exactly why that is the case.

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.

Taking a few weeks off from posting the latest headlines concerning the plight of the dailies has created a massive backlog of items to list. I am not sure if the pace of noteworthy events is accelerating or if it just seems that way due to my short hiatus, but I have about 3 blog posts worth of items to try to get through this week, so here’s the first batch:

• The saga of the Boston Globe continues, with growing acrimony between management and the unions.

• Global readership of newspapers continues to rise, and readership of and traffic stats surrounding newspaper websites continues to lend hope that there is an answer for some dailies who are smart enough with their web offerings.

• News that Craigslist’s revenue will soon top $100M provides further proof that while the site has certainly played a role in stealing classifieds away from the dailies, the credit the site receives in the mainstreams press’ coverage of the death of the dailies is massively overblown.

• Given the recent public statement from Google that they will not be the savior for newspapers, perhaps Apple will step in to carry the day. Or maybe it’s the gaming industry. Or maybe it’s the oft-mentioned ‘user-generated content’ that is helping Hearst’s TV station sites.

• Newspapers are finally catching on to the power and appeal of online video. It seems to be working for Philly.com.

• What a shock! Sam Zell might lose control of his not-so-beloved Tribune. I hope the holders of the $8.6 billion in Tribune debt have fun with their new prize.

• For a preview of what’s coming for almost every single major metro market in the U.S., check out the battle in San Diego between a non-profit online news company (Voice of San Diego), a local for-profit online news site (San Diego News Network), and a cratering daily (San Diego Union Tribune) that was purchased by a private equity group with no experience in publishing primarily because of the daily’s real estate holdings. (Sounds pretty similar to the situation in Minneapolis, although we’ve swapped the local online-only, for-profit website for another daily over in St. Paul).

• True/Slant, the latest entrant into the for-profit, online news & journalism fray offers another possible glimpse into the future of online journalism.

• Right on the ball just like they were in accurately assessing credit risk in the housing, mortgage, and banking sectors over the past decade, Moody’s has released a report on the daily newspaper industry. In the report, John Pucalla writes:

“Ultimately, we expect the industry will need to reverse the vertical integration strategy through cross-industry collaboration and outsourcing print production and distribution processes,” said Puchalla. “Although newspapers may lose some of their in-house control over press time, they would also release resources to beef up investment in content and technology.”

In English, that means newspapers are over-leveraged, crippled by unions, and suffering tremendously due to chronic under-investment in value-added journalism and online technology. What timely and prescient insight.

• In a non-daily related story, the Computer History Museum has posted two fascinating documents that provide some visibility into the earliest days of Apple. These should be heartening for every entrepreneur and early-stage company that’s had to make use of their magic crystal ball to gaze into the future with perfect clarity.

Thanks to Chris Russell of JobBoarders for organizing a really entertaining discussion yesterday on a variety of topics relating to the job board industry. Also participating were Joel Cheesman, Eric Shannon, and Joe Stubblebine.

During the conversation, I went off on a slight rant (not quite meds-worthy in my mind, but that might be up for debate) against TheLadders and the scam they are running that rips off unsuspecting job seekers and tarnishes the entire industry. TheLadders is doing nothing more than scraping jobs from other job boards, aggregating as many jobs as they can get in their database (flawed as that may be given all the legacy issues such as scam jobs, old,old,old jobs, work-at-home scams, and identity theft phishing jobs, etc. that jobs from sites like Monster and Careerbuilder and Hotjobs bring to the database), applying a shoddy filter against the listings to try to identify only $100,000 and up salaries, and then selling job seekers access to the resulting listings. It’s as bad as any scam I’ve seen or written about in the industry, equal in many ways to the criminal behavior of the Employment Guide and the postal ads they run in their thinning publications every week. Like others (here and here), I’d put them all in the same bucket and add serial spammer Hound.com as well.

The question from yesterday’s job boarders podcast that spurred the discussion was whether or not job sites should consider trying to generate new revenue streams from job seekers. We’ve never done this at either JobDig or LinkUp for a variety of reasons, but most fundamentally because that’s not our business. We’re in the advertising business, and we offer employers unique and valuable advertising vehicles to reach quality candidates for their open positions. I’m not sure what you’d call the business model of charging a subscription fee for recycled listings from other job boards, but it’s not a business I’d want to be in.

It has to be the case that the New York Times is reading this blog. The story they ran yesterday on the front page was my #1 prediction for 2008. Either that or they’ve been reading Alan Mutter’s blog, or tweets from themediaisdying or any of the other countless blogs, articles, industry analysts, pundits, experts, or doomsayers that have been predicting the inevitability that a major metro market in the U.S. will lose its printed daily newspaper entirely in the very near future. So even though my analysis may not have been that original, it was a fun article to see on the front page of the New York Times 14 months after I wrote the same thing.

There has been a whole pile of additional news over the past week or two about the daily newspaper industry, along with a bunch of other interesting things I’ve seen and read, so it’s time once again to dump out my list of saved articles and links.

• Q4 ‘08 results for magazines and newspapers were even more horrifying than even the most pessimistics observers would have predicted.

• MinnPost’s David Brauer has a fix for the annoying way the Star Tribune paginates it’s online articles.

• The stars from the best video podcast, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht of Diggnation, made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon’s show. Podcasts have now officially become a mainstream media channel.

• Moody’s new ‘Bottom Run’ classification of the worst credit risk businesses is filled with radio and newspaper companies. What a shock!

• Philadelphia’s newspaper mogul, Brian Tierney, whose company just declared bankruptcy, erupts at the bloggers who are dancing on the graves of daily newspapers all over the country and declares, “We’re not dead yet!” Death might actually be more appealing than the rotting-corpse, zombie-like state that most dailies are in these days. And yet, maybe he’s right.

• 4 dailies in Tennessee are trying desperately to stave off oblivion by sharing resources and cutting costs. At the rate dailies are going, we might end up with one giant (or small) newspaper monopolist that tries to cover the entire country.

• The NYT article from yesterday made the oft-repeated claim that Craigslist stands as the primary culprit behind the demise of daily newspapers. What a joke. And shabby, lazy, simplistic reporting, too. Craigslist certainly took some market share and eroded some revenue, but the site is largely filled with classifieds that would never, ever run in the daily paper, despite what they claim.

• Unions, which have been a substantial factor in the bloated cost-structure of most dailies, are now stepping up as perhaps the last-ditch saviours??!?!?!?!?!

• The New York Times is trying to generate cash from every nook and cranny in the business. I hope they succeed. I could not stand losing the Times.

• Since 1990, only 5 of the 25 largest papers in the country have grown circulation.

• MediaNews Group is the first major newspaper company to finally realize that the answer might be a customized newspaper. It’s most likely too late, but it’s about time that someone from inside the industry finally come to appreciate one of the solutions that has been widely recognized and bantered about outside the industry for at least a decade.

• Denver lost a daily. Seattle and San Francisco will soon lose their dailies. And there’s a growing list of others that will have no daily by year-end.

• Even Rupert Murdoch is having a tough time these days.

• Jason Calacanis, who made news this week for his brazen yet brilliant offer to buy a spot on Twitter’s top 10 recommended list of twitterers to follow for $250,000 (which, by the way, Twitter should accept immediately so they can actually start generating revenue), has written the best piece yet on start-ups surviving in the current economic meltdown.

• The free v. paid content debate rages on.

• Is Patch one of the new models that will fill the void when the presses eventually stop running?

Lots of stuff, and sorry for the massive, somewhat lazy dump of links, but the overflow of stories and links is getting overwhelming, and I’m afraid that it’s actually just getting started. It’s going to be a crazy year.

As usual, I have fallen behind on my posts and am resorting to the easy (and somewhat lazy) tactic of posting headlines that caught my eye over the past few weeks.

• As if print media didn’t have it tough enough these days, distributors are clamoring for a price increase to get magazines onto the newsstands. With the recent slate of titles that have been eliminated and many titles on the ropes for lack of advertisers, this battle couldn’t come at a worse time for either side.

• The Stanford Group is bullish on big media’s ability to weather the current storm. Too bad that the current economic typhoon pales in comparison to the tectonic shifts taking place in the industry. They might last through one, but both?

• Lee Enterprises gets a waiver on its debt covenants, allowing the beleaguered company to delay the inevitable.

• Meanwhile, Gannett’s problems continue to get worse with a Q4 revenue drop of over 22%

• And the seemingly intractable conundrum of growing web readership and declining overall revenue continues to confound.

• Luckily, Henry Blodget has a plan to save at least the New York Times. It appears to be as sound as anything I’ve seen, and far better than management’s lack of any clearly articulated plan and the gradual (or rapid depending on your perspective) decimation that will eventually crush the paper. The details can be debated ad nauseam, but Blodget’s basic premise is absolutely accurate, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand what is keeping newspaper companies from implementing something along those lines. The current issues were obvious at least as far back as 1993 (thanks Jim), and the solutions are just not that complicated. They may not be enough, and it may be too late, but a hail mary at this point cannot possibly hurt any more than throwing in the towel and taking the hit.