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Five hundred jobs will be created in Hillsborough County over the next five years by a major media corporation. Time Warner announced today, it will open an office in either Tampa or Temple Terrace by the end of 2012. As Whitney Ray tells us, the announcement comes as Governor Rick Scott struggles to lower Florida’s stagnant unemployment rate.

Florida beat out Georgia, New York, Tennessee and several other states in a competition for jobs. By the end of 2012, Time Warner, a major media conglomerate, will begin hiring 500 Floridians to work at a new employee services office. The companies CFO says they chose Florida because of its low cost workforce and constant wooing by Governor Rick Scott.

“We were working with the governor’s team and they were very encouraging and very good to work with,” said CFO John Martin.

The announcement brings Scott closer to his target of 700-thousand jobs in seven years.

“We are doing this day in and day out and we’ll have hopefully a lot more announcements like this,” said Scott.

But while the private sector is growing, Florida’s public sector is shrinking. Florida has lost more than 16-thousand government jobs this year. That’s one reason the unemployment rate remains stagnant even as the private sector grows.

For three months the state’s unemployment rate has remained at 10.7 percent. Florida is adding almost 10-thousand jobs a month, but Democrats say the attacks on public sector jobs are keeping the state down.

“There seems to be some idea in this legislature and this administration that public sector jobs are bad, and I couldn’t disagree more,” said State Senator Nan Rich.

Another reason the unemployment rate remains flat is because, as the economy improves people who had stopped looking for work reenter the job market, adding to the unemployment count. The jobs will be created at Time Warner’s new Shared Services office. The salaries will average about 50-thousand dollars a piece and duties will range from payroll to human resources.