It's a funny thing, newspapering. Last Saturday, for example, the Washington Post carried a dour dispatch in its business pages announcing that the DC unemployment rate ticked up another half a percentage point in October. This was "its highest level in 34 years of record keeping," noted reporter V. Dion Haynes. While the 11.9% jobless rate is in line with that of other major cities, there's also a peculiar lag in the employment scene here; even though employers in metro DC have added 10,200 jobs in the more credentialed end of the service industries, such as education and health care, they make a poor match for the District's labor market. Citing the work of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis, Haynes notes that "the District has a higher proportion of undereducated, low-skilled people who have been most vulnerable to job cuts," and so it stands to reason that "many of the new, higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in the city are going to people in the suburbs" of Maryland and Virginia. Eagle-eyed readers of the Post business section might recall a similarly underplayed story from earlier this month, which found that DC's rarely functional government has been stoking this urban skills gap by failing to direct recipients of welfare assistance to programs upgrading job skills and offering counsel on job search strategies-even though such referrals are more or less mandatory under federal law. READ MORE