Nashville Business Journal launches Jobs Watch

The Nashville Business Journal, the American City Business Journals paper that two years ago launched Crane Watch, has started a new feature called Jobs Watch.

Crane Watch is now on all ACBJ paper websites.

Nashville Business Journal editor Lori Becker explained:

Jobs Watch was born out of our reporting. We report frequently on new companies moving to town and existing companies expanding. The Nashville region has one of the fast-growing economies in the country, adding jobs at a record pace. With the rapid influx of new people, new businesses and new money, we wanted a better way to track the job growth in the region. So we created Jobs Watch.

It’s a map of all the notable job announcements in the 10-county Nashville area. We also included sizeable job cuts. The result shows a net 40,000 jobs in the past four years. We know this does not reflect every new job in the region, but it’s a comprehensive look at the significant gains and losses.

Senior reporter Adam Sichko collected the data through a variety of sources, and Design Editor Meg Wrather presented it with a heat map to quickly see where the biggest increases were happening, along with key data for each of the 10 counties. (By the way, these two are also the masterminds behind Crane Watch, the NBJ’s map that tracks the new projects in Nashville and an effort that has since been replicated in all 40 ACBJ markets.)

We will continue to update Jobs Watch, including tracking down more information on how companies’ job announcements compare to actual jobs today. We have some of that data with the launch, but there is more to be collected. We’re excited to see it evolve in the coming months.