And here it is!

According to the Modern Language Association's forecast of job listings, released Thursday, faculty positions will decline 37 percent, the biggest drop since the group began tracking its job listings 35 years ago.

To be fair, no shit.

[NYT. Pic of stereotypical English Lit professor via]

Martha Stewart, our nemesis, had known Crip "Snoop Dogg" on her daytime television program, during which time the two discussed drug paraphenalia, in front of children. "Snoop Dogg" advocated adding illegal drugs to brownies, prompting Stewart to laugh and respond, "I like what you say." She then sternly ordered "Snoop Dogg," an African-American, to "keep rapping," which he did, out of fear. How long until the authorities put a stop to Martha Stewart's dirty schemes? [Oh and she ripped off the weed brownie bit from George Lopez! How low can you go, Martha?]


Mayor Bloomberg's city-sponsored plan to save the decrepit New York media is finally springing into action! There's a free new program called JumpStart New Media, which teaches you—the laid off "old media" person—how to navigate the wild world of "new media." It includes:

* A 5-day intensive boot camp (1-5 February 2010) to re-orient talent from traditional media firms to succeed in new media companies. Participants will learn through presentations, simulations, and dialog about New York's new media economy and the expectations of its firms. They will assess personal working styles, strengths, and weaknesses, aiming to deliver value in a new context.
* An 8-10 week action-learning project in a new media firm. Some projects may turn into continuing assignments. * Regular mentoring, coaching, and networking to support participants during the project period.
* 2-day wrap-up session on completing a successful transition.

Not included: a job.


One hundred and fifteen media types have made predictions for the coming year, 2010, regarding the media! Here is one from the famed "Mr. Magazine," Samir Husni: "And one final note, Bob Sacks will continue to tell us that e-paper is here. Thank you Bob!" Haha. We don't get it.


Newsweek is selling off Budget Travel magazine to an investment firm, because it's hard enough making money one one magazine, much less two magazines. Happily the lying capitalist owners say they will keep "essentially all" of Budget Travel's employees.

Their point: Yahoo made about 1 million euros per worker from Yahoo France alone last year, and used to hype how "it's important to have [locally] concentrated engineering activities... to innovate" in France, where it would base "one of [its] most important centers in Europe." Yahoo France's engineers will now stop working until Yahoo agrees that they shouldn't have to stop working. At least they're fact checking the internet company's hype along the way.

New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin tells CJR he will be taking a buyout (though he hopes to continue writing his NYT blog), confirming earlier rumors. Probably because we now know global warming is a hoax.


At a time when America has lost nearly 90,000 print media jobs in the last year, NPR goes and hires a Canadian as head of its new investigative unit. One, do they even have radio technology in Canada, yet? Two, NPR has always hated America. So.


Chinese propaganda people have demoted a newspaper editor there who did an unauthorized and subsequently censored interview with Obama during his visit there. Kudos to the Chinese for demonstrating how to keep the liberal media under control. (Can you do anything about NPR?)


Here is a story about the promotion of Vanessa Holden to editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine. Conspicuously absent from the story: Any response from Martha Stewart, our archenemy, to our most recent charges against her, namely that she is unpatriotic and "sleeping with the enemy," as it were. Why do you continue to stonewall us, Martha? The American people deserve an answer.

Kyle Daley, recent UCLA grad, 3.5 GPA, political science—tell us his tale of woe, LA Times:

Since January, he has applied for about 600 jobs, mostly entry-level positions such as office assistant, junior analyst and marketing associate. He has reached out to small firms and Fortune 500 companies in aerospace, entertainment, finance and government, from Alabama to Washington state.

The results: two interviews, one in person and another over the telephone, neither of which panned out. Compounding his financial bind, Daley doesn't have enough work history to qualify for jobless benefits. So he lives with his parents and gets around with mass-transit tickets from his mom.

Soon all these college grads who can't get jobs will apply to grad school just to have something to do. So in two years, you'll need a master's degree in order to get a telephone interview at an Alabama finance firm.

You will be politely rejected.
[Pic via]

Sent in by the friend of an ultimately unsuccessful Google applicant, the test was supposed to be completed by the applicant within three days. It asks for a response to an imaginary request from an imaginary Google manager, for an analysis of whether the company — "Poogle," not Google, mind you — can hire 750 engineers in six months to launch a new product within 12 months (click to enlarge):

This is a terrible question. The only issue is whether it is an intentional one, designed to test the applicant.

It's terrible because doubling the number of engineers on the sort of product Google makes — software — emphatically does not make it ship faster, certainly not within the first six months of their work, and certainly not at the scale of 750 engineers.

This has been widely understood among software managers since the publication of Frederick Brooks' Mythical Man Month in 1975. As blogger and former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky summarized the thesis 25 years later:

When you add more programmers to a late project, it gets even later. That's because when you have n programmers on a team, the number of communication paths is n(n-1)/2, which grows at O(n2).

From Mythical Man Month:

Men and months are interchangeable commodities only when a task can be partitioned among many workers with no communication among them. This is true for... picking cotton; it is not even approximately true of systems programming.

When a task cannot be partitioned because of sequential constraints, the application of more effort has no effect on the schedule. The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many woman are assigned...

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort — an exercise in complex interrelationships — communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule.

Even when a software team can benefit from some organic growth (as opposed to Poogle's doubling), it's going to take on the order of six months just to get the new people up to speed on the existing code base and trained in corporate peculiarities, which at Google are significant due to the scale at which it operates (Ken Thompson, legendary co-creator of the Unix operating system and inventor of Google's new Go programming language, still isn't allowed to check in code there, having failed to jump through the requisite hoops, he recently said in the book Coders at Work ).

So "Poogle" shouldn't be asking whether it needs to hire more recruiters to add 750 new programmers to "Product X" in six months; it should be asking whether the feature list for Product X should be trimmed, the deadline lengthened or a subset of it easily split off into Product Y.

But maybe Google is asking candidates to come up with that answer on their own. Whoops.

Supporting documents supplied as tabs to the test:

This one goes on; we've cut it off:

(Top pic: Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Getty.)

The figures come from the industry breakdown of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' new employment numbers [pdf]. Jobs in the print publishing category—that includes newspapers, magazines, and books as well as direct-mail shops and the like—have declined from 863,600 last November to 776,800 last month—a 10% drop (those are seasonably adjusted figures). Last month alone saw a 4.2% decline in print jobs, helped by massive bloodletting at the Associated Press, Business Week, Time Inc., and elsewhere.

And those numbers explicitly exclude internet-based jobs, which don't appear to be tracked separately. So the total number of media workers laid off in the last year is almost certainly substantially higher.

Overall, the new job figures are being described as a small improvement, given the downtick in the unemployment rate. But the largest single employment sector to add jobs in the last month was temporary services, with an increase of 52,000. And the largest drop in unemployment was among teenagers. These are not quality jobs.

And this paragraph from the BLS's release should provide some sobering context:

About 2.3 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force in November, an increase of 376,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.

But there's good news: Employment in commercial banking increased by 1,000 jobs, or about 1%. They always win, don't they?

Google VP Bradley Horowitz (pictured) explained things at the annual Supernova conference in San Francisco the other day. He said the company intentionally (and selflessly!) leaves some brainpower outside its walls, according to the Register.

"I recently had a discussion with an engineer at Google and I pointed out a handful of people that I thought were fruitful in the industry and I proposed that we should hire these people...

But [the engineer] stopped me and said: 'These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.'"

This is very generous of Google, given that it hires "the world's best engineers" via a grueling interview process, complete with quizzes. Some of its best employees had to short-circuit the system, but that only makes it more perfect, right?

Thankfully, Google is using this system for good, rather than evil, by turning down job prospects, for being too awesome. Now that's Christmas spirit: It's a sort of gift to the world. Not to the possible hires, of course, but in this economy they'll be working for an awesome company like Google in no time, right??

(Pic by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten)

If you're a black American seeking a good career here, in the USA, experts say your best strategy is not "going to college." Instead, it is "Being white." That helps more than any degree! In mathematical terms, "Black man with MBA from Dartmouth" is roughly equal to "Luther, the boy who just done got out of jail for the bad check thing but that was probably the drugs done made him do it, and he's white," when it comes to hire-ability.

"Hey," some African-Americans may protest, "that is not fair." Hey, that is not the "up from the bootstraps" attitude that made Booker T. Washington one of the most beloved men in white America! It could be worse; you could be one of the many poor suckers who are working two jobs and are still underemployed, because both of those jobs happen to suck. Now that we think of it, it's likely that many of those people are, indeed, black Americans.

So, bad example.

The point is, it's all about "attitude." There is no "attitude" in "macroeconomics"—there is only "attitude" in U. Get it? So whether you get your money by bitterly auctioning off your motorized bar stool or by stealing Salvation Army kettles, just get that money—with a positive attitude!

Never let irrefutable facts stand in the way of your success.
[Pic via]

The New York Times—a place full of people who pursued Journo Career Path #1—takes a look at the case of Amanda Lindhout, a wild and fancy-free young would-be journalist who saved up money from a waitressing job in Canada to fly off and report from Somalia, freelance. Hardcore! The she was kidnapped and held for ransom and "abused" for 15 months. Not so cool!

So the story is all, "on the one hand, [blah blah journalism training and preparation and a big news organization are all so important and you can't have amateurs running around, blah blah], and on the other hand, [obligatory nod to the pep of the young go-getters]." But all the wavering is unnecessary. To be a journalist, you don't need fancy training, or fancy technology, or a fancy news organization, or fancy "intelligence":

[Amanda Lindhout's] limited finances also restricted the number of armed guards she was able to hire. Journalists from large news organizations will hire up to 10 gunmen, a private army of sorts, at a total cost of $300 to $1,000 a day.

All you need to be a journalist are plenty of guns.
[Related. Pic via]

The listing, preserved here for posterity, goes like this:

obama upper west side (West Village)
Date: 2009-11-20, 6:01PM EST
Reply to: job-ub4ww-1475290617@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]

ATTN: I'm getting a lot of sarcastic emails. Don't bother sharing your wit with me: it's been done. And done. This is an UNPAID internship intended for a STUDENT and is a RESEARCH position that will give him experience and position on a prestige project. If you can't afford to work in a role that offers credit only, but no renumeration, this isn't for you. If you're the sort of person who has the spare time to respond sarcastically to Craigslist postings, this REALLY isn't for you. Thanks.

I'm working on a memoir, set in 1983, when I lived with Obama for a year.

The memoir is about my life and about what New York was like in 1983, and how we lived then, but Barack is obviously a player in the story. This is not a tell-all, it's a friendly, gentle and literate book.

I work full time in a highly visible career and would like to work with a research assistant to help me stay focused.

This is you:

You live in Manhattan and can visit the Village frequently.
Your living situation is stable, as is your personal life.
Your income is stable.
You can work with a six month window. (ok, maybe a year. it depends.)
You are a fantastic and empathetic listener.
You're creative and imaginative and a fine writer. You can shape material.
You don't drink or use drugs. No psychological disorders I have to deal with.
You are in a graduate writing program at NYU or Columbia.
You want an opportunity to work on a visible book.
You are dependable, timely, punctual and highly motivated to succeed.

This is an internship, not a paid position.

I have already begun, finally, this week, after thinking about it for a the last year. Now is the time. My agent is waiting on the first 100 pages. Let's go.

* Compensation: non-paying internship
* This is an internship job
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 1475290617

So: who do we have who needs an "intern" who is also in a graduate writing program? Or, otherwise: which Upper West Side asshole friend of Obama's hepcat days is now enough of a square to need an unpaid slave to help write their feeder-fish book and expect to be paid in the form of, maybe, a thank you in a book that has yet to be written on one year of Obama's life?

Have you applied for the job? You got any guesses? Shoot us an email or throw it in the comments. We'd love to know, 'cause, you know: we've got questions, too.

We have two separate (unconfirmed) staff change rumors today, from tipsters. First, at SI:

At the ever-shrinking Sports Illustrated, the magazine's #2, exec ed. Mike Bevans, has privately announced that he'll be among the staffers taking a buyout. This marks the second Time Inc. purge in a row that M.E. Terry [McDonell]. has lost his aide de camp: last year it was David Bauer.

Second, we hear that the New York Post has replaced veteran police reporter Phil Messing with relative rookie Kirsten Fleming. Indeed, Messing's byline does not show up in a search since last month. Out tipster says, "The fear, of course, is that the writing is on the wall for Phil who is one of the more reliable and experienced police reporters in the city. He's old school. But the Post is rumored to be wanting to get rid of 10 to 15 reporters so everyone over there is worrying that their heads are on the chopping block." If you know more, email us.
UPDATE: Actually, another search for just Messing's last name turns up lots of recent bylines, so he's still hard at work, for now.


Oh Anthony Kennedy went on and on about how his office's demand to pre-approve his quotes in a school paper was misunderstood, but now the WSJ says he did the same thing once at GWU. Whatever. Just don't outlaw abortion.


There used to be a dozen analysts covering newspaper companies for Wall Street. How many are there now? Not so many! Now it's just Rick Edmonds, a dude who works for Poynter, trying to figure out how bad the newspaper apocalypse is. "My conservative estimate is that there is $1.6 billion newspapers used to spend annually on reporting and editing that they don't anymore." Journalism! Related: An incredible graph about magazines, and the money they are no longer making.


BusinessWeek media reporter Jon Fine (a good reporter!), currently on a months-long round-the-world vacation with his wealthy wife Laurel Touby, announces on Twitter that new BW owners Bloomberg have laid him off. One thing he can take solace in: His months-long, round-the-world vacation.

[Note: All info is based on tips and is not verified by the AP. In some cases it's impossible to tell whether multiple tips refer to the same people, but we've synthesized as much as possible.]

New York City
Reported layoffs: One business editor, one business reporter, five multimedia staffers, one sports editor, several writers on the national desk.

Upstate New York
One correspondent and one editorial assistant reportedly gone.

Boston
Four staffers reportedly laid off.

Washington, DC
Reported layoffs: One business reporter, one research staffer, an "enterprise team" reporter (Rita Beamish), an assignment desk staffer, three broadcast staffers.

Pittsburgh
Reported layoffs: One business reporter.

Dallas
One reported layoff.

Jacksonville
Longtime AP reporter Ron Word reportedly laid off and bureau closing. [I remember Ron Word's byline from forever when I was growing up near there, very sad. Shout out to Ron Word!]

Kentucky
Reported layoffs: One news editor in Louisville, one editorial assistant, one state capitol reporter.

Central Wisconsin
One reporter laid off and bureau reportedly closed.

Oklahoma
News editing duties reportedly outsourced to Little Rock.

Michigan
Reported layoffs: One state government reporter, the only Grand Rapids correspondent (bureau reportedly closing), and one editorial assistant.

Dayton, OH
Reported layoffs: One correspondent and one editorial assistant, which means the entire bureau.

Berkeley, CA
One correspondent reportedly laid off and bureau closing.

Roanoke, VA
The only correspondent reportedly laid off.

Bismarck, ND
Only correspondent reportedly laid off.

Santa Fe, NM
One of two correspondents reportedly laid off.

National Staffers
Reported layoffs: A "high percentage" of all editorial assistants across the country, a national photo editor, as many as eight photographers, the AP liaison/executive director of the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME), a national writer, an investigative reporter/ computer-assisted reporting guru (Pulitzer winner Frank Bass),

San Juan/ Caribbean Bureau
Nine staffers reportedly laid off and bureau slated to close.

The Middle East
Reported layoffs: At least three newspeople. One reporter in Jerusalem.

Vietnam
One photographer reportedly laid off.

Beijing
Reported layoffs: One reporter and one other staffer.

View The AP Layoff Map in a larger map

And that's among so-called "movers and shakers;" life might be even tougher on the rank and file. On the one hand, they get copious and diverse free snacks, food from the likes of David Chang and a very competitive salary. But on the other, there's the chaos that results from Google digesting acquisitions like DoubleClick and losing top executives like former ad chief Tim Armstrong. Some of the purported fallout, gleaned from the gossip in Business Insider's post:

• Advertising VP Penry Price is said to have lost power when Armstrong left and to be "looking for a way out."
• Mike Steib, director of emerging platforms, supposedly lost an internal power struggle. One source told BI: "It wouldn't suprise me to see him leave after a while."
  
• Director of media platforms Eileen Naughton won that aforementioned power strugle but supposedly wants to leave because she "thinks it's a crazy place and wants to get the hell out of there."
  
• Google's first Gotham engineer, Engineering Director Craig Nevill-Manning, is so rich, presumably on Google options, that people wonder if he'd rather be "traveling around in Africa having a fun time."
  
• M&A guy Jason Harinstein is said to be "poachable."

So there you have it: Google is a tough place to work in part because of the distracting wealth you earn there and because the awesome job offers you get as a result of working there. Sounds unbearable.

(Pic: Google New York, by Eddie Codel)

Bartiromo wrote a Q&A column called FaceTime, which consisted of her asking questions of some business guy each week. She's not a bulldog questioner, but she's not incompetent either. Her strongest point was access: Hank Greenberg, Tim Geithner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg have all sat for her in the past month.

Her downsides: She's perceived as friendly to CEOs, which is part of the reason she gets that access. And whatever they pay her for that column is certainly inflated by her own celebrity, which is hard to justify when Bloomberg's getting ready to lay off a bunch of BW staffers. They'll be able to get good access with a much cheaper columnist, anyhow; who else will CEOs rattle off talking points to, bloggers? LOL!

Don't feel bad, Maria. Gurl U no Wall St luvs U no matta wut. Gurl let Jamie Dimon buy U a drank.

Dobbs would fit much more snugly into the right-wing stable of shouting heads over at Fox than he did at CNN, where he made an awkward lie of the cable network's attempt to position itself as a non-partisan straight-news alternative to MSNBC on the left and Fox News on the right. But Dobbs hasn't exactly been a ratings dynamo: He was recently losing not only to Shep Smith at Fox but Chris Matthews at MSNBC and even Jane Velez Mitchell at CNN's HLN (formerly Headline News). Burn.

Maybe once Dobbs is unshackled from his CNN overlords he can finally make a bright future for himself in a foreign TV land, one that believes in true opportunity for downtrodden and wandering émigrés like himself.

UPDATE: Video of the announcement is above. Dobbs' comments have observers speculating he'll make some kind of political move.

UPDATE: Maybe not; a CNN statement says "Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere."

The UC Santa Cruz job is no accident; it was made possible by a donation from the Dead themselves. And it's not just drug bands spreading counterculture good fortune these days:

• Amid mass journalism layoffs, a new hippie-friendly type of gig has opened up: Pot reviewer. Denver's alt weekly went looking for just such a fellow, to serve the booming local market for "medical" marijuana.
  
• Grungy well-heeled young music fans made this year's Coachella music festival a "super happy" success. Far out for concert organizers who refused to grow up and get a "real job!"
• Vegan animal activist Jane Velez-Mitchell has a hit show over on CNN's Headline News and can now aspire to the even greater level of success attained by left-wing-radio-host-turned-MSNBC-anchor (and fellow lesbian) Rachel Maddow. (Maddow was a Rhodes scholar, putting her on the high achieving side of hippiedom.)
  
• The White House installed an organic garden under lobbying from Alice Waters, delivering a PR victory to the restaurateur derided as a hippie "dreamer" on national television just days earlier.
  
• In San Francisco, the sort of company that holds "naked" meetings and makes decisions through unanimous consensus is now showered with VC cash.
  
• A protest marcher from a hippie college changed his name to the militant "Barack" from the placid "Barry" and was soon elected president of these United States.
  
• If you advocate turning your cat vegan or making men pee while sitting down, for the environment, the New York Times will publish your op-ed, these days.

And all this time you thought "get a job" was the ultimate way to insult a hippie. Who's laughing now, straight edge??

(Pic via)