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This study considers whether newspapers' employment decisions are predictors of the general state of the economy. The editorial help-wanted section of the weekly trade publication, Editor & Publisher (E & P), was used to measure newspapers' decisions about hiring, and correlation was sought with the gross national product (GNP) across 30 years. The highest correlation was between the ads and the GNP 6 months before the ads appeared. A multiple-regression model using newspaper advertising expenditures, the GNP, and the unemployment rate to predict the editorial classified ads was significant. However, when total newspaper advertising expenditures were broken into national, retail, and classified expenditures, only retail expenditures correlated significantly with E & P employment ads.
Roark et al. (Fri,) studied this question.