It has been a long time coming, but The New York Times has finally joined Pinterest. As with most of the social media site, the Times’ boards aren’t anything that will blow you away intellectually.

One board titled “Color Riot” features brightly colored things, like a borderline neon green leaf. Another, called “Cheesy” is chock full of pins on cheesy treats. That’s a common theme for the Times’ Pinterest, as seven of its 15 boards have to do with food.

Alexis Mainland, one of the social media editors at the Times, told WWD that editors will one day be pinning items to the site, so maybe the content will get a little more interesting down the road. But for now, enjoy boards titled “Hair,” which have… Well, you can probably figure that one out.

Pinterest drives traffic, so news organizations would be smart to try and take advantage of that. By one set of metrics, PBS, USA Today, Newsweek/The Daily Beast and The Wall Street Journal are all doing fairly well. Poynter analyzed a collection of 13 media entities using Pinterest, including The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Washington Post and more, and found that PBS leads the pack when considering “repins.”

For every pin PBS posts, it is repinned six times. Following PBS is USA Today (4.4 repins per pin), Newsweek/The Daily Beast (4.3) and the Journal (4.2).

The New York Times wasn’t counted in the study because the paper isn’t on Pinterest yet. There is a Times Pinterest account, but all that is there is a post proclaiming that it is “starting in June 2012.”

Better hurry.

For glossies on Pinterest, there’s Real Simple, and then there’s all the rest. According to Ad Age, Real Simple is the first print magazine to reach 100,000 followers on the site. Pinterest drives twice as much traffic to Real Simple than Facebook and Twitter combined, so staffers should be pleased with themselves for reaching that milestone.

RealSimple.com’s General Manager, Shannon King, told Ad Age that the magazine has success on Pinterest because its content is “bite-sized, visual and digestible.” For example, one of Real Simple’s most “repinned” items is a ketchup bottle used to pour pancakes.

Hey, we didn’t say Real Simple’s Pinterest was intellectually stimulating; just popular.

Pinterest — the social networking site that allows people to collect a bunch of crap in one place — is not only all the rage right now, it’s driving more and more traffic to women’s magazines.

Mashable reports that Pinterest is now the top social referrer for Marthastewartweddings.com and marthastewart.com, beating out Facebook and Twitter combined. The site is also on pace to become Country Living’s biggest source of referrals, and is in the top ten for Elle Decor, Self and House Beautiful.

That’s some serious news, especially considering that Pinterest is relatively new. It’s proof that not only is the site here to stay, it’s going to be a major player among the social networking heavyweights.

We bet some of you just pinned this, didn’t you?