Wichita ? The New York Times ran a long, gloomy article on Wichita’s economic downturn on Wednesday.

It detailed the layoffs, the impact on businesses, the strain on charities, the broken dreams.

Yet some familiar with Wichita’s development effort say the article may be a recruitment poster in disguise.

One of Wichita’s biggest handicaps in recruiting industry to town has long been its tight labor market, said Dennis Donovan, a director of global site selection for Wadley-Donovan Group of Edison, N.J., one of the country’s top site selection firms.

“This is good news,” Donovan said. “With the downsizing, a prospective manufacturer can take advantage of an underemployed pool of skilled workers. Site selection consultants are always interested in communities that are going through restructuring and downsizing.”

The key, he says, is that Wichita retains almost all of the factors that make it desirable — quality education, low land and housing costs, and nice community amenities — but now it also has the advantage of available labor.

In the article, Wichita Area Chamber of Commerce President Tim Witsman said that aircraft employment likely would never return to previous levels.

For economic development purposes, he said, that meant Wichita’s skilled labor force would be available for some time to come.

“We’ve had situations where consultants would tell their clients that workers will go back to aircraft when the economy turns up,” Witsman said. “But the truth is, aerospace everywhere has lost jobs over the last 20 or 30 years. Wichita was able to buck that trend through 1998. But everybody is making things with fewer people, more outsourcing and overseas. That’s what you have to do in business.”

And publicizing that, said Troy Carlson, vice president of Right Management Consultants, would help Wichita in the long term. The country is headed for a long-term labor shortage. Wichita would become increasingly attractive for that reason, he said.