Chart of the Day: Net New Jobs In January

The American economy gained 200,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 110,000 jobs. That’s OK but not great. The employment-population ratio stayed flat yet again, and the headline unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.1 percent. The absolute number of unemployed workers went up by 108,000, which is not great news, and 153,000 workers dropped out of the labor force—also not great news.

Overall, this report strikes me as a little weaker than the topline number suggests, but still decent.

Wages of production and nonsupervisory workers were up 2.4 percent. That’s only slightly above inflation, so we’re back to sluggish wage growth after a single month of good news.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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