John Barrett of the executive search firm Cook Associates scours LinkedIn every quarter to understand the hiring trends at Internet and digital media companies in Boston and New York. (I posted about his Q2 report back in July.)

The news wasn’t good in the third quarter: only 260 net new jobs were created among the 152 companies he tracks. That’s just a 1.9 percent increase over where things were at the start of the quarter. Growth was stronger in Q1 and Q2: 8 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively.