by popular demand

or really, just one person...

the url for medill's new service is: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/

this story is on the front page now, but front pages get changed just about daily. the best way to find business writing (which is frequently too boring to be included on the front page) is to click on the "business" link at the bottom of the page.

to find my stuff, i type my name into the search box.

believe me, we know how ghetto and user-unfriendly our website is. everyone is embarrassed by it, especially the knight scholars, who could easily re-build the front end in a day if someone would let them. our CMS is also off the hook and involves pounding flax into paper and making ink out of crushed beetles.

keep in mind that we write to a local audience, so everything is localized unless it's a story involving news in chicago or illinois. i've become the queen of graphs and the consultant extraordinaire in the newsroom for quick excel graphs that look terrible (but are accurate). we get extra points (literally) for graphs that we make, so i - being of reasonable intelligence - always include a graph or image with my stories. it basically doubles the points for my stories, enabling me to halve the number of stories i actually need to write for the course.

here's my story from thursday:

Unemployment claims drop, economy still weak

April 29, 2010

Advance initial claims for unemployment insurance dropped to 448,000 in the week ended April 24, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Labor. That was down 11,000 from a revised figure of 459,000 the previous week.

Economists were expecting 445,000 claims, according to Yahoo Finance.

“Any time it goes down is good news,” said Michael Miller, associate professor of economics at DePaul University in Chicago.

Despite the decrease and other early indications of a stabilizing American economy, local experts say that the country is still in recession. The four-week moving average of initial claims rose by 1,500 to 462,500, an increase from the prior week’s average. The moving average has climbed for the past several weeks.

In Illinois, the four-week average decreased by 228 claims compared with the prior week. The four-week number paints a more accurate picture, and shows that last week’s claims are “in essence relatively flat, and down significantly from a year ago,” said Richard Kaye, an economist with the Illinois Department of Employment Security. Compared with the same period a year ago, new claims are down 41 percent, or 9,320 claims.

Illinois had fewer layoffs in the construction and service industries, according to the report.

“Job loss is slowing down, but you still have a pretty terrible labor market. That’s certainly true for Illinois,” said Bob Bruno, a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Labor and Employment Relations. “The average duration on unemployment is still terribly high. Illinois is in that group of states that has to keep extending unemployment benefits.”

During a robust economic phase, initial unemployment claims can number from 325,000 to 400,000, according to Miller.

“While moving in the right direction, we’re still at the level of claims in the middle of recession numbers. We still have a long way to go,” Miller said. “We were worse for so long in the 600-range.”

In March, more than 44 percent of the nation’s unemployed had been jobless for 27 or more weeks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The March unemployment rate in Illinois was 11.7 percent, compared with the national average of 10.2 percent.

The four-week average may have been negatively skewed due to the timing of the Easter holiday, according to local experts.

The Dow Jones industrial average climbed 122 points Thursday.