I can’t say I’m unhappy that the microchip has replaced the dead tree as the dominant means of conveying information in our culture, though that change sure has had a disruptive impact on my business life.
For many years the number of people working in the information supersector (as the census classifies it) has been steadily decreasing. But very recently — the past five years for which data is available — the number of employees has been increasing again. Released late last month, the 2015 national numbers indicate the total employment level in the supersector came within a fraction of one per cent of what it was ten years before. The 2016 numbers will surely achieve a new high.
The information supersector consists of six subsectors: the publishing industries (except Internet), motion pictures and sound recording, broadcasting (except Internet), telecommunications, data processing and hosting, and a grab bag of “other” information services.
Print publishing (877,345 employees in 2015) lost about 150,000 jobs in the past decade and will almost certainly lose more. Telecommunications (1,026,329) lost about 200,000. Broadcasting (259,527) lost 25,000.
Meanwhile, two other major subsectors have been expanding briskly. Data processing and hosting (539,171), which includes Facebook and other companies like it, has been gaining jobs in recent years and is about 85,000 jobs above what the category was a decade ago. Likewise motion pictures and sound (431,554), which is about 115,000 higher than a decade ago.
Then there’s the information grab bag. The “other services” category has almost quintupled nationally from 54,052 jobs in 2005 to 260,391 in 2015. That’s where the major disruption has taken place. The job growth hasn’t been in such things as libraries and news syndicates, but in a census category that didn’t exist in 2005: Internet publishing, apps and web development, for which total employment in 2015 was 212,902, certainly the lion’s share of the category.
For the second year in a row, employment in the information sector in San Francisco County grew — to 64,223 in the first quarter of 2015 from 56,684 the same quarter the previous year. This result wasn’t a flash in the pan from hiring by a single big information company.
Employment in the information sector in San Francisco has more than doubled from 2010 to 2015. That gain is particularly significant because employment in the sector had been flat for the five years previous to that.
In the earlier five-year period, employment gains in Internet publishing, web portals, mobile apps and other digital occupations were cancelled out by losses in traditional publishing jobs. Since then, the loss of traditional jobs in the information sector is trickling along at a reduced employment level, while jobs in the digital fields have continued to expand briskly. Voila! Continuing annual gains of thousands of jobs for the information supersector.
What is true for San Francisco is true to a large degree for the heart of Silicon Valley. Santa Clara and San Mateo counties doubled their information jobs in the past ten years. Alameda County jobs grew less. Some of the outer counties in the region are still losing more information jobs than they are creating.
At the turn of the 21st century New York City, world capital of significant parts of the information sector, by one count had 187,200 jobs in the information sector. This year, 2017, it had 193,100.
Not much change, right? Like in San Francisco, there’s been tremendous intrasector movement. The heart of New York’s classical information industry — newspapers, magazines, books, broadcasting and telecomm — have been shedding employees for years. In terms of employment, these trades are just a shadow of their former selves. But their job losses have been cancelled out by Gotham job gains in some of the same digital information sectors as in northern California. The New York City information supersector has gained jobs every year since 2010.
Not so the Hudson Valley, which is still in an earlier phase of the reorganization of the information supersector. Of the nine counties in the region, seven have continued losing jobs in the information space. The exceptions are Greene County, which gained a few, and Orange County, which recorded a big information-job jump from 2748 in 2014 to 3538 in 2015. By 2015, the Hudson Valley had lost 30 percent of the information jobs it had in 2005.
How’s Ulster County, which has in the neighborhood of a thousand information jobs in its workforce, doing? Because even census data is statistically unreliable when it comes to small populations and infrequent information-gathering, it’s hard to tell. The 2012 economic census says one thing, the data from county business patterns or the On The Map app says another.
With the nation as a whole is losing less than one per cent of its information jobs and New York County gaining 15 percent, where should our local economic development efforts go? At this disruptive time, the strategic net should be cast widely. Building on the area’s assets may be more productive than nurturing clusters of existing industries. Were I in charge of economic development around here, I’d focus a lot more than is being done on attracting the most tech-savvy New York City millennials to Ulster County, whether they be in the motion picture and sound recording industries, in other information services, or elsewhere.
Join the family! 
