IPA NY Voices That Must Be Heard




IPA-NY MISSION: The Independent Press Association-NY (IPA-NY) works topromote and support independent publications committed to social justice and a free press. In pursuit of this goal, the IPA provides technical assistance to its member publications and is a vigorous public advocate of the independent press.

The Ethnic Press Explosion of New York City

by Abby Scher, Director, Independent Press Association-New York

I had discovered the Arab Post lying in a stack in the vestibule of The Tripoli restaurant on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and it was fitting that its publisher and editor met me there some weeks later for a talk.

Safieeldin Deyab told me a story not so different from the one I had heard from many other immigrant publishers. An Egyptian, he had a varied career before deciding to publish his own newspaper in New York City, including service as the United Nations correspondent for an Egyptian daily. In order to support his start-up newspaper and the web page that made it available to his compatriots at home, he continues to freelance for the daily and for the BBC. He does what it takes to ensure the survival of his paper.

Mr. Deyab is like many other immigrant editors in bringing rich journalistic experience to his enterprise. It is relatively cheap to start a newspaper here, compared to Egypt where massive government fees maintain strict control of the press.

New York is experiencing a boom period for the ethnic press as immigrants like Mr. Deyab, African Americans and well-settled Latinos launch their own newspapers. At the invitation of NY editors, IPA-New York formed in April 2000 to build a mutual aid network among these ethnic publishers and the community press. Among its programs: technical assistance workshops, a New York-only listserv, and an Independent Press Club where these lower profile members of New York's journalism community interview prominent newsmakers, such as Schools Chancellor Harold Levy last fall. At a May 2000 meeting publishers agreed their largest problem was getting a hearing from major regional advertisers both because they are "ethnic" and because many are not audited. We developed a relationship with the Audit Bureau of Circulations to devise a step by step program that will help our magazine and newspaper members institute the recordkeeping needed to pass an audit and so make them more attractive to advertisers. And to raise their prominence with advertisers, in March we released Many Voices, One City: The IPA Guide to the Ethnic Press of NYC, listing 198 magazines and newspapers of 52 ethnic and national groups publishing in 36 languages.

Such a directory is long overdue. New York City has long been both an immigrant city, and a "majority minority" city, and that demographic fact has found cultural expression in its wide-ranging immigrant, black and Latino press. Its current revival is turbocharged by the steady economic growth of the past eight years and the "diversity" law passed by the U.S. Congress in 1992 that opened the gate to groups underrepresented in earlier immigrant streams. These include Bangladeshis, Africans, Egyptians, Poles and the Irish.

New York is the media capital of English-speaking America, and it is the ethnic media capital as well, with newspapers distributed nationally out of offices in Astoria, Chinatown or Brooklyn. Once, immigrants clustered in particular cities or rural enclaves published their own papers. New York retains high concentrations of immigrant residents, but elsewhere, immigrants are a bit more dispersed and may read a New York paper if they live in an area that cannot sustain its own media.

The ethnic media boom rides not on these far-off subscribers but on the huge pool of media consumers who arrived in New York City between 1992 and 1996, when more than half a million of the city's 3 million immigrants arrived. If you want to know which ethnic group formed new newspapers during the 90s, you need only glance at the top ten countries of origin from those years, including the Dominican Republic, the former Soviet republics, China, Jamaica, Poland, India and the Philippines.

The press in almost all of these communities has grown. The number of Polish and Russian language newspapers is easily a third greater than a decade ago, and the circulation of the Chinese language dailies has steadily grown to a combined circulation of half a million from about 170,000 in 1990. The Indian community, which had one newspaper 25 years ago, now has at least eight with a combined circulation 212,300. On the right newsstand, you will find a Jamaican (Weekly Gleaner or Weekly Star), Guyanese (Guyana Monitor), Dominican (El Nacional), four Filipino, and an Ecuadoran (Ecuador News) newspaper written and published in the metropolitan area. Unnoticed by outsiders, the African press of New York has grown astronomically to five magazines and three newspapers.

The growth in the number of black papers during the 90s appears to be the greatest since the 60s and 70s, when many black papers formed and folded. These newspapers inspire intense loyalty in their readers. While some cities have no black newspapers, the 24% of New Yorkers who are African American have a choice of ten, including The Daily Challenge, a black daily. Many of the black papers are community papers with a strong regional base, like Black Reign of Staten Island, Our Time Press, which covers Bed Stuy, and the Amsterdam News, a city-wide paper whose special home is Harlem. A major competitor to the Amsterdam, the City Sun, folded in the mid-90s, a time when at least three new black papers, including Black Reign and Our Time Press, emerged. These papers - like a few of the new immigrant newspapers - sidestep the perennial problem of winning space on crowded newsstands by giving the papers away for free, borrowing the successful business model of many community newspapers.

The 29% of New Yorkers who are Hispanic have four Spanish-language dailies, including one El Nacional, that particularly targets the new Dominican New Yorkers. They also can pick up one of at least 13 weekly or monthly newspapers that focus on their family's country of origin, including Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico. In a new trend, a few of the new neighborhood newspapers are bilingual, with local news in Spanish and in English, building a readership across ethnic groups. These include Manhattan Times in Washington Heights and Highbridge Horizon in the Bronx, both founded within the last two years. La Voz de Queens is another newcomer published in both Spanish and English.

"Ethnic" newspapers edited by and for immigrants come in many flavors and are not all news driven. The older, more established immigrant groups have an older, more established press that assumes its readers have an English language news source. Their job is to provide cultural articles and features on the home country or social issues. Often only one such paper remains for a community. The younger papers of the newer immigrant streams are more news driven, reporting news and sports from the home country. Many also cover news of the immigrant group in the U.S., provide Hollywood-style gossip about the stars and throw in some international and national news if they are the major news source for their readers, as is often the case for those targeting recent immigrant groups.

Impact of the Ethnic Press

When the network news covers communities of color, it tends to emphasize crime stories or colorful ethnic festivals. Even the broadcasts of the Spanish language networks in New York focus on crime news, according to Marta Garcia of the New York Hispanic Media Coalition. The group's preliminary research shows a similar trend in the daily Spanish press. Turnover at the major English language media outlets and the high percentage of out-of-towners on staff means reporters often fail to acquire deep knowledge of their beat. With a shallow understanding of the history of an area, "most reporting is done from a here and now perspective," observes Don Heider in his recent book White News.

Community building is an underappreciated by-product of the way some of the ethnic press covers its news. Reporting that is historically aware helps crystallize group identity and gives readers a long-range view of how change happens. This long view sustains people's sense of the possible when government or other institutions fail to acknowledge their concerns. You see it particularly in the African American press, which regularly runs articles on that group's social history.

Whether an immigrant newspaper is historically minded or not, it helps cement and remake a group consciousness and identity in a new country. They provide "ways of interpreting American life" and the struggles of immigrants here. By covering the news of the entire home country or region, the papers often dissolve distinctions that had been active back home, creating a broader solidarity. Robert Park observed this process early in the 20th century, when large New York dailies dealt with "Italy" or "Germany" not Genoa, Naples or Saxony.

The press often takes an active role in helping a group coalesce as political actors and as a political constituency. You'll see local politicians at events held by the Russian Forward and Sada-e-Pakistan in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, or by the Haitian Times a few miles north.

The ethnic press gives consistent attention to issues less interesting to their mainstream counterparts. Irish Voice editor Debbie McGoldrick is so committed to covering immigration problems that she serves as a sort of Dear Abby in a regular advice column. Labor problems only given token coverage in the mainstream press are aggressively covered in select newspapers published by the newer immigrant groups. Two of the seven Bangladeshi newspapers (Weekly Thikana and New Probashi) are known for their quality reporting on the dangers faced by construction and other day workers.

Scale of the Ethnic Press

Today, most of the ethnic press remain independently owned islands in an increasingly corporate sea where 86% of (English-language) newspapers are owned by corporations. Even so, there are a growing number of exceptions to the rule. The major Chinese papers are owned by media companies in Taiwan or Hong Kong. In the year 2000, the Greek daily Proini sold a major ownership stake to a Greek newspaper company. The small Courier Life chain in Brooklyn runs a 125,000-circulation free Caribbean paper, Caribbean Life, as well as a free Chinese monthly, and is continually looking for new papers to take over. The Star and the Gleaner, two dailies owned by the same monopoly in Jamaica, followed their readers to NY and formed weeklies of the same name to serve them. Similarly, in the Korean community, The Korea Central Daily News is the US edition of a Samsung-owned daily in Korea.

Some of the newspapers have radio or television stations, including the News India-Times, an IPA member, but in general the media is not as integrated as in the English speaking world. Nor are they as profitable. If Gannett pursues profit margins of 22% and more to impress stockholders, many ethnic publications continue to follow the path of family-owned papers and invest whatever they earn back into their enterprise. And while there are many large newspapers with extensive staff and healthy ad revenue, there are also those, like the Arab Post editor, who support their newspaper through other employment because the ad world has not yet discovered them. Other IPA publishers are probably nodding their head in understanding the range of experiences among the ethnic press in NYC.

Click here to order "Many Voices, One City: The IPA-NY Guide to the Ethnic Press of New York City" or "Small Papers, Powerful Voices: Why New York City Needs an Association of Ethnic and Community Newspapers"; our FREE white paper from the IPA, Conservatree, and Co-op America.