This from the RBA's Guy Debelle, who makes an interesting link between employment conditions in the traditional media industry and the traditional media's news coverage:
MR DEBELLE: Yeah I mean one thing on the structural adjustment I think which is interesting is that you read in the paper about so and so company announcing a bunch of lay offs, what you don’t read is about this company actually added a few jobs today. And the aggregate employment numbers tell you that more 20 people added jobs than laid them off. So the structural adjustment’s going on but the bad part of it is heavily publicised, I mean one aspect of it is there is a fair bit of structural adjustment going on in media, so the journalists know because they’ve got the guy sitting next to them or the girl sitting next to them, which has been given a redundancy, but I mean obviously that’s happenings of both of the 25 two major media organisations in the country at the moment, so that amplifies it. But actually the stories of so and so company is laying off a couple hundred people or so and so is going out of business is a very large discreet and obvious event, whereas a lot of the growth has been in the sort of services sector that Elizabeth was talking about earlier, a lot of small companies, the IT sector who 30 don’t have a lot of media coverage or media presence and that’s where the growth is and it’s not a – one that’s not you know good news doesn’t sell as well, but it’s harder to report story than the big obvious lay offs. So the structural adjustment has both positive and negative bits, and the negative bits are much more obvious than the positive bits, which are much more incremental.
