The reporter will help in coverage of the Minnesota Legislature, Minnesota aspects of the 2012 presidential race, local and statewide politics and policy, and a range of other issues important to Minnesotans.

The successful candidate will be a prolific, versatile, tenacious writer who can bring enthusiasm to beat reporting and regularly put together aggressive investigative pieces that focus on accountability in the public realm.

The individual will work with MnIndy Editor Paul Schmelzer in coordination with The American Independent News Network’s (AINN) national editorial staff.

The role’s key criteria for success is generating “impact journalism,” with reporting that demonstrably affects the public debate and advances the common good. MnIndy’ s staff achieves this goal through a combination of aggressive reporting and tenacious, insightful blogging.

Responsibilities include:

• Report and post throughout each weekday, filing the equivalent of 10 stories per week — a minimum of one of which is a feature-length piece.
• Break stories that frequently achieve demonstrable impact, creating tangible effects and changes for the common good.
• Be an active user of Facebook, Twitter and other social media to promote your own pieces and to engage the political blogosphere.
• Participate in all site-wide meetings and daily updates with editor.
• Work with MnIndy and AINN’ s outreach team to help promote your work and the site as needed.
• Adhere to the program’s journalistic code of ethics.

Preferred candidates will have experience in political reporting plus blogging and/or online journalism and will be intimately familiar with Minnesota politics.

To apply send a résumé, a one-page cover letter and three recent clips to paul@tainews.org.

Overview

The Minnesota Independent is a nonprofit, nonpartisan online news site, providing daily original investigative reporting and analysis of state and local issues. Its writers have won numerous awards, including Society of Professional Journalists Page One Awards and the University of Minnesota School of Journalism’s Frank Premack Public Affairs Journalism Award.

An American Independent News Network site, it investigates and disseminates news that impacts public debate and advances the common good. The American Independent News Network operates a nonprofit, nonpartisan network of online news sites: The American Independent, The Colorado Independent, The Florida Independent, The Iowa Independent, The Michigan Messenger, The Minnesota Independent, The New Mexico Independent, The North Carolina Independent News, The Texas Independent and The Washington Independent.

That means little to the 14.9 million Americans out of work, of course. Unemployment tends to lag recessions, meaning that it takes some time for businesses to rehire workers after an economic shock, and in 28 percent of U.S. households, one member is still seeking a full-time job.

But how long until businesses start hiring again? Yesterday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put out this ominous chart:

As the chart shows, it might take months and months for the economy to return to full employment. In reality, the chart is not quite ominous enough: Most economic evidence implies that the United States won’t return to an unemployment rate in the five percent range for years and years. Economists at the Kansas Fed examined the phenomenon in a paper called “How Will Unemployment Fare Following the Recession,” released at the end of last year.

First, they note that after deep recessions, the U.S. economy tends to rebound quickly. Why? Businesses initially react strongly to the bad recession, laying off workers, producing fewer goods, and selling off their inventories. When demand returns, those businesses need to hire workers and produce a lot of goods again, and fast, to keep up.

But, unfortunately, that dynamic has not been true for the recent recessions. Businesses lay off workers and stop producing goods as the recession hits. But when the recovery happens, businesses just make do with less — adding hours to existing workers, and rebuilding inventory slowly. This produces the “jobless recoveries” you hear about.

Moreover, recoveries tend to take longer after recessions paired with banking crises, like the Great Depression. And, yes, this recession kicked off with a massive meltdown on Wall Street, followed by woes in the commercial banking sector and the collapse of hundreds of small banks.

What does that mean? Years until employment recovers. By the Fed economists’ projections, the U.S. unemployment rate should hit 6.5 percent — a still-elevated rate — in 2018.

“The indicators point to a slow expansion through the end of the year,” Ken Goldstein, a Conference Board economist, said in a statement. “With inventory rebuilding moderating, the industrial core of the economy has moved to a slower pace. There appears to be no change in the pace of the service sector. Combined, the result is a weak economy with little forward momentum. However, the good news is that the data do not point to a recession.”

In English, and with a little context: Businesses have stopped restocking inventory, as they were earlier in the year, helping the economy. So, an uptick in production or hiring seems unlikely until consumers return to buying more goods. Consumers won’t start buying more goods until unemployment falls, but unemployment looks like it might climb. That does not necessarily mean a double dip. But it also does not mean Recovery Summer.

Here’s the topline figures from Challenger:

After a 61 percent increase in March, the number of planned job cuts announced by American employers fell sharply in April to 38,326, 43 percent fewer than the 67,611 layoffs the previous month. The April job-cut figure is the lowest since July 2006 and comes just two months after the previous low of 42,090 in February….

So far this year, employers have announced 219,509 job cuts, 69 percent fewer than the 711,100 announced in the first four months of 2009. At the current pace averaging 54,877 job cuts per month, annual job cuts could end the year below 700,000 for the first time since 2000.

And from ADP:

Nonfarm private employment increased 32,000 from March to April 2010 on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the ADP National Employment Report. The estimated change in employment from February to March 2010 was revised up, from a decline of 23,000 to an increase of 19,000.

In addition, the revised estimate of the monthly change in employment from January to February 2010 shows a modest increase of 3,000. Thus, employment has increased for three straight months, albeit only modestly. The slow pace of improvement from February through April is consistent with the pause in the decline of initial unemployment claims that occurred during the winter months.

Nevertheless, of course, the economy needs to pile on jobs much, much more quickly to make up for the 8 million jobs lost during the recession. At this rate, it will take a decade to return to normal employment levels.

Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists digs out a directive from Adm. Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, making it easier for people with noncitizen relatives to join the intelligence community. Dense, I know, but it’s a real issue — we need a lot of people in the intelligence world who, say, speak Farsi or Pashto or Arabic. Oftentimes, such crucial-language speakers have family members who aren’t citizens and up till now — crazy, I know — it was difficult to impossible for them to get hired by the CIA or NSA because Aunt Fatima was still waiting on her papers.

Here’s the relevant paragraph of the new directive, dated Oct. 1:

“Subjects who have immediate family members or other persons who are non-United States citizens to whom the subject is bound by affection or obligation may be eligible for access to SCI and other controlled access program information as the result of a condition, deviation, or waiver from personnel security standards.”

So, yeah, you can see, the hiring policy still isn’t without restrictions. There remains a curious paranoia inside the intelligence community about shady foreign-connected ne’er-do-wells infiltrating the arteries of national security, even though the most notable agents of internal subversion have been lily-white real Americans like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Still: step in the right direction.

OK, enough of me — Ted Stevens has just been found guilty …