New and Digital media stories 27/01/14

Broadcasting's poor ethnic mix has an impact on everyone

The lack of black and minority ethnic people must count as one of the industry's great moves backwards

The position of women in broadcasting, for example, is arguably improving and even disability post-Paralympics has a higher profile than ever before – something else has gone very wrong indeed. Whereas in 2003 Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people amounted to 7.6% of the creative industry workforce they now account for just 5.4% – a drop of a third over a decade during which their proportion of the population at large has grown significantly. In short, the position of BAME Britons in broadcasting and the creative industries is now significantly worse than it was ten years ago.

This must count as one of broadcasting's biggest moves backwards, with plenty of potentially contributory factors. But that was then. Now ITV plc is a single corporate entity that has subsumed the old regional companies across England and Wales, with an overall national perspective. Nevertheless the years of relative neglect mean fixing the ethnic diversity problem, even at the BBC, will take time. Meanwhile talent is finding expression elsewhere and broadcasting runs the risk of becoming ever more estranged from sections of Britain's population.

Urgent action is needed to reconnect the increasingly fragmented bits of our creative 
industries – and broadcasting in particular. In order to show social media more diverse and equal more ethnic presenters, characters and actors should be used so that audiences can see the industry as a fair and equal opportunity for all. 
Furthermore in order to make the industry more equal, television should be studied and looked upon and broadcasters should more more African American. The fact that African American are not as frequent on television could represent the industry and how racism in this widely changed industry has not progresses in terms of racism and is still to show favouritism towards the white working man. 
Having different ethnic groups as presenters or other important roles in television allows equality and shows that no one is disregarded due to religion, race or ethnic background which is important in this day and age. 

Mirror, Independent and Standard enjoy festive website traffic boost

Three sites buck annual trend, but Mail, Guardian and Telegraph report month-on-month declines in daily unique browsers

Mirror Group Digital, Independent.co.uk and Standard.co.uk enjoyed month-on-month traffic gains in December, when the festive holiday usually results in newspaper website user numbers dipping. Sure enough, the UK's three most popular newspaper websites – Mail Online, theguardian.com and Telegraph.co.uk – reported some decline in average daily unique browsers over the festive period compared with November.

• Mirror Group Digital cracked the 2 million daily unique browser mark for the first time in December
• rising 8.61% month on month to hit 2,023,770 
• Trinity Mirror's digital business, which also saw a 5.29% rise in monthly web browsers to 42,880,543 
• MGD reported 33,935 readers of the Monday to Friday version of its free e-edition, which is defined as a replica of the print newspaper read on devices such as tablets and does not include app usage, and 5,048 punters who paid £3.99 for the weekend digital edition.
• Independent.co.uk had a strong month with a 5.45% rise in daily browsers to 1,355,770 
•  The largest faller among national titles reporting ABC digital figures in December was the usually irrepressible Mail Online, which saw daily browsers drop 5.7% to 9,810,129, and monthly browsers dip by 4% to 161,320,058.

People seem to be using more and more portable devices and therefore they prefer accessing their news via the internet on a website published by the newspaper as this is easy and practical. Whilst technology is becoming more advanced, the demand for print newspapers would be in decrease therefore it is safe to say that newspaper publishers should take their business on the internet as this is where they will now be making their revenue.