It took longer than Twitter wanted, but the company has named two new board members: Pepsi CFO Hugh Johnston and Internet entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox are in, and Peter Currie and Peter Chernin are on their way out.
Twitter Swaps Out Two Board Members
But Jack Dorsey didn’t bring in a Famous Hollywood Type. At least not yet.
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Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
This was a move Jack Dorsey and co have been trying to make since February. It’s not clear it’s precisely the move Dorsey originally wanted, since neither Johnston nor Fox are Famous Media People like Shonda Rhimes, whose name came up in these discussions a couple of months ago.
If you are keeping track of the board’s demographics, as Dorsey does, than you will note that it is now a bit more diversified, since it is replacing two white guys with one white man and one white woman.
In a tweet published just after announcing the new names, Twitter chairman Omid Kordestani suggested that there are more changes coming:
The entire Board is working to bring greater diversity to our ranks. Watch this space
— Omid Kordestani (@omidkordestani) April 8, 2016
And in case that wasn’t clear enough, Dorsey has now made it more explicit:
More additions to the board soon, ones that will bring diversity and represent the strong communities on Twitter. This matters & is a must.
— jack (@jack) April 8, 2016
Both Johnston and Fox have plenty of professional bona fides, too: Johnston has been at Pepsi since 1987, minus a three-year walkabout at Merck. Fox is best-known for co-founding European travel site lastminute.com during the first Web boom and she’s active in promoting digital services and education in the U.K.
A nice bonus for Twitter is that Fox, unlike some Twitter board members, actually uses Twitter, and not just to announce that she’s joined the board. She’s just shy of 200,000 followers, and that count will certainly go up today.
Johnston is the reversion to the mean: He has a Twitter account, but according to his profile he has yet to publish a Tweet. He does seem to be a fan (recently, at least) of ESPN reporter Darren Rovell.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
