Welcome to the new week.
First, a handful of posts that look at the employment numbers from last week. Then a couple of interesting media focused reads. And finally, The Super Bowl ads, because you’ve got to be current and up to date.
The Big Picture turns to pictures to put some perspective on the employment numbers: A collection of 10 charts that show show bad the job situation has been, how it has leveled off and where some of the bright spots are.
If we need credit to ease up to help drive new job creation, then we’ll need banks to start behaving differently. Business Insider shows, in 13 slides, how the bank market is consolidating, reducing lending to businesses and consumers and increasing purchase of government securities.
One of the interesting wrinkles in the overall employment picture is how resilient the market for college-educated workers has been. Americans with a BA or higher have just a 4% unemployment rate. (via BusinessInsider)
Jeff Jarivs has spent time with a lot of local media people over the past couple of weeks and published an important post that synthesizes a lot of what he’s been hearing and puts it in the context of the deep experience he has with Internet media. The conclusion: Don’t sell scarcity, sell service and results. The thinking is very compelling and important to read.
In the context of Jarvis’ comments, Barry Ritholtz’s dissection of the economics of his recently published, well-reviewed book is very instructive. The book doesn’t make you money; the footprint that the book gives you can create the overall value of your personal brand. But you’d better have a strategy for making money off that personal brand.
If you don’t have that kind of strategy and you write, you’ll find yourself in the position of working for virtually nothing, as Tony Silber of Folio: strongly observes.
The last little media tidbit: Josh Bernoff writes about Forrester’s recent decision to require its analysts to blog on Forrester’s platform and not build a personal digital footprint that competes with the corporate brand. It’s an interesting problem. If the economic value of content is diminishing because of the Internet dynamics, and people who have skill at writing need to be more distributed in how they earn a living, then can media enterprises — even high value enterprises like Forrester — reasonably demand exclusivity in terms of digital footprint?
And, finally, here are all the Super Bowl ads.
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The chart to the right forms the basis of an argument by W. Michael Cox of AOLNews that suggesting that the American Middle Class is oppressed ignores the remarkable penetration of devices that save time, create connections and entertain in the average American’s life.
Yes, all these devices cost less, and the average American consumer can afford more cool devices.
The question of the state of the Middle Class isn’t as simple as questions of food and shelter. It isn’t as easy to define as the access people have to electronic devices.
