The Seattle Times has won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for its series on pain control in Washington state.
The Pulitzer citation says: “Awarded to Michael J. Berens and Ken Armstrong of The Seattle Times for their investigation of how a little known governmental body in Washington State moved vulnerable patients from safer pain-control medication to methadone, a cheaper but more dangerous drug, coverage that prompted statewide health warnings.”
And Eli J. Sanders, a writer at Seattle’s alternative weekly newspaper, The Stranger, won the Pulitzer for feature writing “for his haunting story of a woman who survived a brutal attack that took the life of her partner, using the woman’s brave courtroom testimony and the details of the crime to construct a moving narrative.”
Each prize comes with a $10,000 check. Truly, a Poo-litz surprise! [24×7]
Seattle’s Surging App Economy
Todd Bishop of GeekWire has filed a report that concludes, “466,000 jobs have been created by the “App Economy” since 2007 — including programmers, marketers, interface designers, managers and support staff working on apps and infrastructure for platforms including Android, Apple iOS, BlackBerry, Facebook and Windows Phone.
Broken down by state, Washington is currently third (by percentage of workers), at 6.4 percent, with California first at 24 percent and New York second at 7 percent.
The research, conducted for industry group TechNet based on trends in help-wanted ads and other economic data, states: “Every major consumer-facing company, and many business-facing companies, has discovered that they need an app to be the public face of the business. In some sense, that makes the App Economy the construction sector of the 21st century, building a new front door to everyone’s house and in some cases constructing a whole new house.”
According to a recent study by TechNet, a political consortium of CEOs representing the technology industry, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro area was listed as the nation’s fourth-largest market for app developers, with about 5.7 percent of the nation’s app-related jobs. The other major regions included San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara (6.3 percent) and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont (8.5 percent) in California, and New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island (9.2 percent). By state, Washington ranked third in terms of market share, with 6.4 percent, bested only by New York (6.9 percent) and California (23.8 percent).
A recent NWJobs.com search for “mobile engineer” tech jobs in the Puget Sound area showed nearly 400 openings, mostly from Amazon.
While the app economy has been calculated by TechNet to be worth roughly $20 billion at the end of 2011, the number of jobs created has been harder to track. “One thing to realize is that this entire business segment didn’t even exist until 2007,” says John Drescher, executive director for the Northwest chapter of TechNet.
In fact, the app economy is so new that the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t even have the capability to track purely app-related jobs. The closest they come is a catch-all category called “Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and Web Search Portals,” as defined by the North American Industry Classification System, the TechNet study says. [24×7]
