Is Adweek Culturally Weak?

by Guest Contributor HighJive, originally published at MultiCultClassics

Way back in Essay Fourteen (March 2005), MultiCultClassics noted DiversityInc.com called out Advertising Age and Adweek for the publications’ lack of minority representation in editorial content. Why, MultiCultClassics even generously offered suggestions in Essay Seventeen.

Since then, Advertising Age has shown dramatic progress. The enterprise has provided consistent, detailed reporting on diversity-related issues, covered multicultural marketing and launched The Big Tent blog.

Adweek, on the other hand, hasn’t done shit. In fact, parent company VNU even dumped Marketing y Medios, a leading source for news on Latino marketing.

When others spotlighted the dealings between Madison Avenue and New York City’s Commission on Human Rights, Adweek was conspicuously absent. The New York Times’ Stuart Elliot and Advertising Age recently ran stories on the agencies’ alleged progress, and once again, Adweek was nowhere to be seen. This week, Elliott and Ad Age mentioned the “major new initiative that will specifically address the dearth of African-American executives” presented at the 4As Leadership Conference. Adweek didn’t bother typing a sentence about it.

Is Adweek lazy, culturally clueless, racist, too White or just plain irrelevant? Probably all of the above.

But since the magazine is no longer a weekly, and there appears to be no effort to generate more inclusive content, perhaps it should be officially renamed Adwhite.