Minority employment up in TV and radio, widening gap with print

Television and radio employed more minority journalists last year than the year before, according to the latest release from RTDNA’s annual survey. Minorities now account for 21.5 percent of the television workforce, up from 20.5 percent the year before, and 11.7 percent of the radio workforce, up from 7.1 percent in 2011.

TV continues to clobber newspapers in most measurements of diversity. Earlier this year ASNE figures showed the percentage of minority employees continued to decline in print newsrooms.

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Agencies Don't Pin Pinterest

Pinterest may be the darling of the social media world, but it has not been widely embraced by agencies. A new survey by the Creative Group finds that only 7% of advertising and marketing executives said their firms are using the visual social network for business purposes and 44% have no interest in adopting Pinterest.

Another 18% had never heard of the site, and 17% said it caught their eye but they were hesitant about using it for work. Just 10% said they planned to start using Pinterest as a business-related tool.

Pinterest enjoyed meteoric growth earlier this year, becoming the fastest stand-alone site to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark, according to comScore. As of July, it had 23 million monthly visitors.

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A new boss for an old paper

The New York Times Company (has) appointed Mark Thompson, the departing director-general of the BBC, a British public broadcaster, as its new boss. But Mr Thompson is an odd choice to lead a big, struggling private company. One analyst uncharitably compares his appointment to hiring the boss of a big charity to do a corporate turnaround. Mr Thompson has spent most of his career in public-service broadcasting at the BBC, save for a few years as boss of Britain’s Channel 4 television, a commercial broadcaster. The BBC is state-backed, and owes its survival to a tax on every household in Britain with a television set.

Last year it adjusted its pay wall and by June had boosted the number of digital subscribers to 509,000 between the New York Times and its stablemate, the International Herald Tribune, up by 12% in three months. However, the company still relies on advertisers for over 40% of its revenues, and online advertising rates are lower than those in print. Mr Thompson will have to devise a more radical business plan than trying to catch print papers’ fleeing subscribers.

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the impact of digital technology on the Islamic World

A recent survey by Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that rich Muslim-majority countries boast some of world’s highest rates of smartphone penetration, with the United Arab Emirates ahead at 61%. But even in poorer Muslim lands adoption is respectable: 26% in Egypt, not much below Germany’s 29%. More than a third of people in the Middle East now use the internet, slightly above the world average.

Muslims use their gadgets in much the same way as everyone else: they text, they use social networks, they buy online. But the adoption—and Islamification—of the technology has a deeper meaning, says Bart Barendregt of Leiden University, who has studied South-East Asia’s growing digital culture. “Muslim youngsters are adopting technology to distance themselves from older, traditional practices while also challenging Western models,” he argues.

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