One of the problems of an industry press is there is usually far more pages to fill than there are stories to fill them. This is true in almost every industry, and this was true even back before the Internet took away the physical limit of pages. Thus, the phenomena of “press release” stories. Make a provocative claim, whip up some statistics to prove your claim, and blast out a press release; reporters desperate to fill the unfillable news hole will make some nominal rewrites, maybe quickly think up an opinion to sprinkle in to help differentiate from the other reporters, and send the article to be published.

And with that, we present the Techmeme-friendly report that claims “Apps have created a half-million new jobs”. What is an “apps” job and how do we know how many jobs they created in the economy? They just counted how many job postings mention things like “iPhone” or “app” or “Blackberry”. Such a rigorous methodology. The same standard could prove Microsoft Word has created millions of secretarial jobs. (The report does not seem to consider the possibility that some of those jobs may have just shifted away from other, declining programming disciplines.) Then it adds in multiplier effects in order to argue that increases in other industries came because of those newly created jobs. (This is not a poor assumption to make, but they have not done much to prove the direct increases, much less these indirect increases.)

As weaksauce as this report is, it touches all of the correct biases of the tech-press. Smartphones and related businesses are the future. The idea we’re in a new tech-sector gold-rush. We will see this report (PDF) cited over and over again.