More Bad News, but Just How Bad Is It?

The disappearance of help-wanted ads in newspapers is one thing. Who knows if that's a true sign of a weakening jobs market or just further evidence of the precipitous decline of the newspaper business?

But now the Conference Board has some mildly unsettling news: Help wanted ads on the internet are declining, too.

For the first time since it started counting online help-wanted ads — admittedly, only since May 2005 — the board says that the number of listings declined year-over-year in March.

The board counted 3,733,200 online advertised job vacancies this month, down 0.6 percent decline from 3,754,400 in March 2007.

A slight drop? Sure. But the pain was not spread evenly. Losses were sharper in the New England, South Atlantic, and Pacific regions. California, which has the nation's largest labor force, for example, saw ad volume fall 19 percent from March 2007 level; in Florida, the decline was 15 percent.

Not all news was bad. Online help-wanted ads in Texas rose 8 percent in March from the same month a year ago, and the number of ads in New York grew 1.4 percent.

Across the country, the number of new online ads in March rose 2 percent from a year earlier, though they were 12 percent below the level of last April.

by Mark Stein