Poll Shows Audience Growth Even as Ethnic Media Struggle

On the eve of its National Ethnic Media Expo & Awards, New America Media, a collaboration of more than 2,500 ethnic media outlets, has released a poll suggesting that "Ethnic Media Outlets Gain in Readers and Viewers" even as the economic downturn is taking a dire toll on small niche publishers of the sort represented among NAM's affiliates.

In its poll analyzing current figures against those taken in 2005, New America Media has marked singificant growth in Hispanic-targeted media in particular: "The penetration of Spanish-language radio stations and newspapers has increased substantially...Moreover, Spanish-language television stations now reach 86 percent of all Hispanic adults in the United States, while access to the Internet among Hispanics has grown from 24 percent in 2005 to 37 percent this year."

It also finds that "Other ethnic communities are also tuning into their media outlets. African-American audiences for television stations, radio stations and newspapers that focus on Black themes has increased about 10 percent since 2005; Chinese-language television stations and newspapers now reach 70 percent of all Chinese adults in the US, up from 55 percent in 2005; and Korean-language newspapers reach 64 percent of all Korean adults in the country, a boost from 46 percent in 2005."

The report makes an argument for the increasing relevance and importance of ethnic media for addressing the unique interests of niche communities, even as many publications are shutting their doors -- at least on the brick-and-mortar, paper publishing operations. Finding industry "strategies for surviving the economic downturn" is the theme of NAM's annual Expo, which takes place this year on June 4-5 at the Atlanta Hyatt Regency Hotel.

For more, see Poll Shows Ethnic Media Outlets Gain in Readers and Viewers

Important Changes Underway to IMDiversity Job Bank

IMDiversity.com will be moving this month to a new jobs database format with streamlined job search and resume management tools. We invite you to preview the beta model of our new job bank and its extended network of jobs at http://jobsearch.imdiversity.com.

For jobseekers with existing accounts, your account tools, resume, applications history, jobs in-box and search agent will still be accessible on our current system at http://jobs.imdiversity.com until May 31, 2009. If you have any outstanding applications you would like to make to jobs saved in your in-box, we encourage you to do so or to make a copy of the posting before then.

If you have not visited our site recently, we hope you will explore our new job bank, now with simple new methods to search a vastly expanded network of postings, filter relevant jobs and schedule automated searches. Although the new system does not require it to search for and apply to jobs, creating a new account at http://jobsearch.imdiversity.com/jobseeker/ takes only a moment, and lets you also access the new versions of our easy-to-use searchable resume posting and custom job search agent.

More information, see: http://www.imdiversity.com/migration/

Updates to the Virtual Diversity Career Fair

We're pleased to announce the addition of several employers participating in the 2009 Virtual Diversity Career Fair, co-presented by IMDiversity, THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online, and Black College Wire. The annual event spotlights employers who confirm they are still actively seeking entry-level and student/recent graduate candidates for open positions in the second semester until graduation. Interested candidates of all backgrounds, majors and degree types are welcomed to review and apply for opportunities.

Now available for review on the Fair are profiles and current opportunity postings for the following employers:

Boy Scouts of America

CGI

City Year

Covance, Inc.

FBI

GEICO

Harris Corporation

Mercer

MTA Metro-North Railroad / Human Resources - Employment

Raytheon

Regions Financial Corporation

SRA International, Inc.

The TJX Companies, Inc.

T-Mobile

Walgreens

Whirlpool Corporation

Additional employers will be added on a rolling basis as they come in and announced throughout the duration of the Fair.

Seasonal Special: Entry-Level and Student Job Opportunities

The Editors are pleased to announce their work on our annual just-in-time features for our site visitors who are seeking entry-level or student internship/co-op employment opportunities before graduation.

We've added new readings and current opportunity updates to our Entry-Level/New Graduate and Internship/Co-op quick search channels, including the annual feature analysis, Job Outlook for the Class of 2009, by Dr. Phil Gardner, from our sister publication, THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine.

The 2009 Outlook definitely looks bleak, says the director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. But there are some remaining bright spots, as new grads in some majors continue to benefit from large retiree pool.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the class of 2009 faces a much more daunting task entering the entry-level job market than we've seen in many years. From our perspective as a producer of multiple jobs and careers sites, employers across a wide variety of sectors are clearly trending toward modest college hiring activity. Compared to this time last year, fewer new opportunities for new college graduates are being featured on our Entry-Level Channel. Anecdotally, many employers report they completed their planned college hiring activity earlier this season, or have scaled back on campus recruitment events.

But the outlook is not entirely hopeless, as we've discovered in an ongoing informal survey of employers this late winter, and IMDiversity is pleased to be a co-presenter of the 2009 Virtual Diversity Career Fair for recent grads and entry-level candidates being hosted on THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online, and also co-presented this year by our friends at Black College Wire, the news service for Black college students.

Following last year's highly successful Pre-Graduation Virtual Career Fair, this annual online event feature the employers from the Top 100 Employers List, as seen in THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine Second Semester Super Issue, plus other employers from a variety of sectors who confirm they are still seeking diverse entry-level candidates despite the economic downturn and decreased campus recruitment activity. Many are also seeking college students and new graduates for internships and coops.

We will post more about the Fair in the days to come, but in the meantime encourage IMDiversity.com student and entry-level jobseekers of all backgrounds, majors and career interests to visit the Fair, create a quick free THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online Job Tools account using the Fair's quick preregistration form, and subscribe for Fair updates.

IMDiversity publishes THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Second Semester Super Issue

We're pleased to announce the release of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Magazine Second Semester 2009 Super Issue - the Top 100 Employers / African-American History Month Issue!

Online previews of the magazine features will be released at THE BLACK COLLEGIAN Online throughout the month, as well as extra and extended, online-only features.

Highlights include:

TOP 100 Employers for the Class of 2009
Job Outlook for the Class of ‘09
African-American History 101 Contest
Barack Obama: The Making of the President 2008
How to Find Your Dream Job In a Nightmare Economy
Living Beyond the Dream - 40 Years After Dr. King
Diversifying Graduate and Professional School
Career and Life Management Plan: Why Include Graduate School?

The magazine is distributed through Career Services offices on college campuses nationwide.

Job Fair Specials: NPO, NGO and "Dot-Org" Jobs

Following on the heels of our Multimedia and New Media Jobs Fair, and in the spirit of the harvest/Thanksgiving season, we are continuing with our new series of short-term, time-sensitive Job Fair Specials with a new focus for the rest of the November: "Opportunities in: Nonprofit, Not-for-Profit, NGO and Community Service".

At the request of several past site users now, as well as a number of hiring organizations, this will place special focus on Featured Opportunities with non-corporate employers. Whether small community organizations in the non-profit/not-profit sectors, global non-governmental organizations, charitable foundations, or sort-of-public/corporate entities such as the Corporation for Broadcasting, many of these employers may be actively promoting excellent opportunities for professionals of all kinds, applied toward particularly rewarding kinds of do-gooder ends. However, such positions may also go under-noticed in regular, high-volume job search results.

So if you're a "dot-org" kind of person, do take a look at some of the employers highlighted in fair, running now through November 30, 2008. If you are interested in these kinds of opportunities, apply to (or offer) any, and would like to see us highlight more of them, be sure to let us know.

IMDiversity's 100K-Plus Jobs Section Back Online

After a hiatus, IMDiversity has restored our feature, $100K-Plus Jobs, our section of high-paying featured job opportunities offering salary ranges extending to $100,000 or above. Visitors may notice that in some cases, positions that are not regular full-time salary jobs may offer equivalent hourly rates instead.

We had to take this highly trafficked section offline for a period during the fall in order to work on new programming and placement for it. users are welcomed to visit and bookmark the section once again, as well as to create save the $100K-Jobs search results as a personal auto-alert agent by creating a free custom My Job Tools Account at IMDiversity.