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And Now The NewsAs mainstream and alternative newspapers struggle to remain relevant, ethnic media explodes, speaking to readers in their own languages.by Kevin UhrichA day in the working life of Jackie Hsu begins much the same way as any editor of a major newspaper might. City editor of the Chinese Daily News, Hsu starts Friday’s 10-to-12-hour afternoon shift looking through press releases written in English and Mandarin, checking stories in the daily and weekly English-language papers, perusing wire services for breaking news and checking emails from correspondents in San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas. A little while later, she’ll be deciding which stories will be shipped off to the paper’s offices in San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, and New York. The Chinese Daily News, also known as the World Journal, is a newspaper that many Angelenos have never read, much less heard of. But throughout the Chinese-language community, it is a giant. The paper is produced on the outskirts of Los Angeles in Monterey Park, in the middle of the one of the largest Asian enclaves in the United States, and covers national and international issues, devoting hefty amounts of its seven-section daily package to local school board and city council decisions being made in its home communities. Today’s front-page headlines: More on the war in Iraq, the Oscars, and the start of a blockbuster special report on the Guantanamo Bay military prison camp, written and photographed by Special Assignment Editor Andrew Sun. Sun’s tour of the camps, the lynchpin of his largely uncritical three-part series of stories and photos, was the byproduct of his longtime friendship with camp commander Brig. Gen. John Gong. Just more proof that the Chinese paper is functioning much like the Los Angeles Times — only with a fraction of the local circulation and resources. And, unlike the Times, its influence is growing. Like perhaps no other time, major American newspapers are in big trouble. Circulation figures at some of the country’s top papers are hitting record lows, forcing upwards of 2,100 job losses nationwide, with 300 of those layoffs at the L.A. Times alone. The Tribune Co., which owns the Times, recently cut its storied City News wire service, where writing greats Kurt Vonnegut, Mike Royko and Seymour Hirsch got their starts. But while all that is happening, the number of publications in languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Armenian, and Farsi is growing faster than ever — especially in Los Angeles. Also growing are the corresponding news, entertainment, and public affairs television and radio broadcasts. Once-marginalized people have now found their voices — and in their own languages — as major players in the American publishing business. “The ethnic media is the fastest-growing media in the print world,” said USC communications professor and author Sandra Ball-Rokeach. And that is happening without much help from established publishing houses, philanthropists, traditional journalistic trade associations or the government. “Our focus will definitely be on areas with large Asian populations, Chinese populations,” the 44-year-old Hsu says in flawless English, explaining the dynamic nature of the paper’s transnational audience and its increasing importance as a source of reliable international news. Crisp color photos and splashy, even excessive use of red ink does a good job of explaining things and giving the paper — even with Chinese characters — a look and feel as lively as any major newspaper. But along with the Chinese characters setting it apart, there’s another major difference: “We might cover a little bit more than the L.A. Times; we try to do that,” Hsu says wryly. Runaway Growth Newspapering is a big business in the United States — $60 billion a year — but, for years, that number has been shrinking. The layoffs, buyouts and downsizing at the L.A. Times has become all too common nationwide. Buyouts have been offered at San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. And, according a recent report in American Journalism Review, The New York Times Co. expected to cut 45 newsroom jobs at The New York Times and 35 positions at its Boston Globe as part of a 500-person downsizing. Whatever the cause of this disconnection between writers and readers in America’s English-language newspaper publishing industry — increased production costs and competition, distrust, disinterest, the internet — the bottom line is people aren’t picking up papers like they used to anymore. Except, that is, in languages other than English. Over the past 15 years, the US, and Southern California in particular, has seen a greater influx of new and non-English-speaking immigrants than at any other time. The papers and other news outlets that have come into being during this time have performed a vital function: Down-in-the-neighborhood reporting, giving readers what they want — and quite often need — to survive. “The difference” between English-language mainstream papers and so-called ethnic papers, even those published in English, “is the ethnic media has extensive coverage of news from back home,” says Julian Do, co-director of New America Media, a San Francisco-based nonprofit association of ethnic and other-language publications and broadcasters. The group, with its Southern California headquarters on Grand Avenue, near MOCA in downtown LA, went nationwide earlier this year, changing its name from New California Media. “Second,” Do continues, these ethnic papers focus on “the communities right here in America. And third, what’s happening at the national and state levels.” A native of Vietnam who formerly worked as a reporter with Pacific News Service in Northern California, Do said New America Media members total more than 700; most of them print news outlets. When it comes to broadcasting, a recent survey by the Excellence in Journalism Project found that ethnic media — print, television, radio, the internet — reaches 84 percent of members in the three largest minority groups in California. One major contributor to this flood of information is Spanish-language Univision television in Los Angeles, which has a larger audience than any of the city’s English-speaking stations. Another is La Opinion. The L.A. Times was well aware of the potential cultural crossover in La Opinion, the Spanish-language paper that serves as the daily news, sports and entertainment bible for a huge number of Spanish-speaking Angelenos, and bought the paper a few years back. The paper, which is now owned by Spanish-language publishing giant ImpreMedia, is now so well put together that city newshounds feel the need to learn Spanish, if they don’t already. Major magazines are also starting to tap into this exploding demographic, with Los Angeles magazine, for instance, starting its own Spanish-language magazine for hip, urban Latinos, Tú Ciudad. But the Latino market is not the only one that’s growing, and growing fast. Today, nearly every Asian nationality is represented by their own press, with such Southern California-produced publications as Rafu Shimpo and Asahi Japan, the Khmer Monthly News and Serey Pheap for Cambodians and the Korea Daily, to give a small offering of the hundreds of publications that are currently operating in Los Angeles alone. Among black-owned newspapers in the western US, The Sentinel is certainly one of the oldest and most influential papers in the region’s African-American community. That profile skyrocketed two years ago when Brotherhood Crusade founder and Pasadena developer Danny Bakewell bought the paper. Since then, Bakewell says he’s raised the professional bar on the writing and is looking for more investigative stories, such as the exclusive that ran last week on internal strife at the offices of the recently deceased lawyer Johnnie Cochran, a personal friend of Bakewell’s. “We’ve put a lot of emphasis on the look of the paper and the reporting. Now we’re doing more than rewriting press releases — real investigative reporting,” says Bakewell. The motto of the paper is “The Voice of Our Community Speaking For Itself,” and the combination of better reporting and improved cross-promotion with other media, such as radio stations Power 106 and KJLH 102.3-FM has raised its profile considerably. “I remain excited, I remain motivated, I remain committed to providing a way for the black community to tell our story, from our perspective,” says Bakewell. Unprecedented diversity Ball-Rokeach once remarked to Terrence Smith of “The News Hour” on PBS that the academic world had been trying for years to get people to recognize the importance of ethnic media in the daily lives of large populations. “Not only for understanding their home country but also leading their everyday lives, like where to go to purchase goods, where to go to have recreation. Where is it safe? What's going on in the community that you should know about?” she said. Today, she says, “I think the print world is in a period of adaptation to the internet and that they have an even more diverse audience that they need to reach.” New America Media founder Sandy Close observed how these various other-language media are finding their ways into English-speaking publications. On a recent front-page story in The New York Times, for example, Close noted three Middle Eastern names on the tagline at the end, most probably because “the reporter couldn’t go out and do the reporting firsthand,” says Close. “The fact is we are living in a society here in California of unprecedented diversity. How do we communicate with one another across these racial, social and linguistic lines? So the whole question of communication is very challenging. I’m finding more and more the paradigm of journalism that we have relied on for much of the 20th century needs to be expanded and reconstructed,” Close says. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism (www.journalism.org), US Census figures show that the number of white people in America fell from 83 percent to just more than 75 percent in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000. During that same period, the number of Asian/Pacific Islanders grew from 1.5 percent to 3.6 percent. By 2000, there were 35.3 million Latinos representing 12.5 percent of the population, making Latinos the largest minority group in the country. Even with all this growth, though, large newspaper chains have yet to make partnerships with these communities, and not much interaction exists beyond a handful of other ethnocentric publications and associations, such as the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ). The California Newspaper Publishers Association makes links between mainstream papers and non-English-language papers, but Close says those connections are actually pretty rare. But that, literally, is where the country is going. Between 1990 and 2000, the number of people not speaking English in their own homes grew by nearly 50 percent, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism report. Spanish speakers led that growth, with Chinese coming in second, going from 1.3 million in 1990 to 2 million in 2000, a 54 percent increase. “I see this as a very confusing and fascinating time, with a lot of catching-up to be done with technological trends, popular trends and globalization trends that are now having a more visible impact in the media business,” says Ball-Rokeach. Perhaps some of this confusion, as Ball-Rokeach calls it, is responsible for a credibility gap that continues to nag the non-English papers. The Project’s survey, which was published in 2004 and focused on African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics and Middle Easterners, found that second-language readers tend to trust English-language media outlets more than those in their native languages. Latinos, by a 38 to 23 percent margin, found English-language media to be more trustworthy than that in their own language. Among Asians and Middle Easterners, the gap is wider, with 60 percent of those polled saying English-language media are the most credible. Nevertheless, independent publications continue to flourish in places where it seems their brand of basic journalism is most needed. In well-heeled Glendale, for instance, a city of 214,000 in the foothills northeast of LA, where more Armenian-Americans reside than in many Armenian cities, there are at least a half-dozen Armenian-language newspapers competing for ad dollars against the mainstream papers like the Glendale News-Press, which is owned by the Times, among them Asbarez, which owns not only the international Asharez Newspaper, the nation’s oldest and largest Armenian-language paper, but also Horizon Armenian TV. There are also newspapers with names such as the Aravot Daily, Zhamanak newspaper and Aragast magazine Likewise in Monterey Park, a burgeoning suburb on the edge of Latino-dominant East Los Angeles with a population of 64,000 that is now nearly 70 percent Asian, papers are thriving there in a variety of native tongues. Most are published in Mandarin and some, like the Chinese Daily News and the Hong Kong-based Sing Tao Daily News, the largest and oldest Chinese-language newspaper in the world with offices in San Francisco and Canada, have global distributions. Worldwide Diasporas These readily accessible diasporas give the Chinese and other-language papers an edge over their American minority counterparts in both the mainstream and independent press. According to numerous studies and anecdotal conversations, Chinese people often arrive in the US with a fairly high degree of education and are habituated to news consumption, thus making theirs a global newspaper and television market. That should come as no surprise, considering China and Taiwan have been for decades steeped in print journalism traditions as the world's largest producers of daily newspapers, with mainland China alone accounting for 15 percent of the world's total daily production, with 90 newspapers in 13 languages, according to a recent Chinese government report posted at www.crienglish.com. Along with that, China has its own ethnic press, with 13 foreign-language newspapers, mainly in English and Russian. But newspapers clearly mean different things to different people, as they do to different governments. According to a recent report published by UCLA’s Asian Media Center, communist government officials in China, who have never been exactly wild about the idea of free speech, at first closed down the popular publication Freezing Point and fired offending writers and editors for publishing what writer Minxin Pei described as “unorthodox views on Chinese history, Taiwan, and other sensitive topics,” including a revisionist take on the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. After intense protests by intellectuals and so-called liberals, government officials opened the paper again, but refused to rehire the editorial staff. “China's prohibitions on livelier, more authentic news are growing stronger, sources say — and extend to radio, TV, newspapers and the internet,” said a recent story in the Christian Science Monitor, partially explaining why China leads the world in jailed journalists, with 39 under detention. The recent flap over attempts by the Chinese government to censor Google is only the latest in a long list of crackdowns on free speech by communist officials. In America, few such restrictions exist on news content. Still, most Chinese-language papers tend to steer clear of political controversies, going so far as to avoid writing critical editorials or even endorsements in local elections. This self-imposed censorship is largely rooted in basic economics. With a very targeted demographic, it doesn’t pay to risk losing readers. Also, the reporters are generally paid much less in the ethnic press than are their counterparts in the mainstream English-language press, despite all the stories they actually break. The 152 workers at the Chinese Daily News, for example, attempted to unionize a few years back, as the Weekly reported at the time. At issue were mostly pay and benefit concerns. Had this effort been successful, the influential daily would have become not only the first Chinese-language paper in the country to be represented by a union, in this case the Newspaper Guild-Communication Workers of America; it would have been the only paper in the San Gabriel Valley, and one of the few in Southern California — mainstream, alternative or ethnic — to have union representation. Journalists with the L.A. Times, the Pasadena Star-News, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Whittier Daily News all failed in their respective efforts to win the right to collective bargaining in the early 1990s. But five years ago, workers at the Chinese Daily News had won their fight, if only for a short while. Management appealed the vote to the National Labor Relations Board, which ultimately ruled against the workers. Things at the Chinese Daily News have changed dramatically since that tumultuous time. For starters, the company, which is celebrating 30 years, has a new president, James Guo, a friendly and apparently well-liked man who served as editor in chief a few years prior to the union organizing and returned from Taiwan three years ago to take over as vice president of the company, just missing all the labor turmoil. Since taking over, Guo says pay has improved across the board, starting with entry-level reporters, who are all at least bilingual and all possess at least one graduate-level degree, usually in journalism or mass communications. They now earn just short of $30,000 a year, around the same amount that a similar position pays in the alternative and mainstream worlds. A benefits package is also offered by the company. The paper is expanding, installing another press and soon launching a Sunday magazine. Higher working standards have apparently had a positive effect, because “More than half of our reporters have master’s degrees,” Guo said with no small degree of pride during an interview in his office in Monterey Park. “They have to be bilingual, they have to be able to read English and write in English and when it comes time to write, it has to be in Chinese, and they have to be good in Chinese,” he said. The Chinese Daily News operates independently, but works closely with a Taiwan-based global newspaper network consisting of seven other papers with offices in Canada, Paris, Thailand, Indonesia and mainland China. For an example of a similar business model, think of Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group Inc., which publishes 50 daily newspapers in North America, including the Denver Post, the Salt Lake Tribune and, here in Southern California, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Star-News, the SGV Tribune, the Whittier Daily News and the Inland Empire Daily Bulletin. “We offer a lot of information that people need to settle down in this new land,” Guo says. “Most of our readers are new immigrants. They need to know how to live here, how to rent a house, how to get food and transportation. This is all the information they need to live here.” By this standard, then, we should all be reading everything. Because don’t we all need more tools to survive a globalizing world? Ethnic media, says New America Media’s Close, “has truly grown up out of the tremendous hunger to have some way to navigate this global society,” adding her group’s research shows more than 51 million people in the United States access other-language publications on a daily basis. “They don’t want to just be informed. They want to be visible in society. I see that as a great resource for all of us, particularly for those of us in the business of communication,” Close says. “We need each other to create a new paradigm for journalism that really serves the global society.” Sharing information and resources seems to be part of the answer for publishers like Bakewell, a developer who made millions at business, but readily admits that he didn’t really know what he had when he purchased The Sentinel. Over the years, the 73-year-old newspaper has belonged to the National Newspaper Association, the National Newspaper Publishers Association and CNPA. Today, the plan is to start connecting dots. “The future of The Sentinel,” Bakewell says, “is a lot of partnering and a lot of consolidation of efforts.” #
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