During one of the panel discussions at the UNITY conference in Chicago last Friday, Cristina Azocar, director of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University, said, during a Q&A session, “Look at the ethnic media in this country, it is overtaking the New York Times because people don't see their stories on the newspaper.”
Her statement, however, did not declare an immediate victory for this niche media. On the contrary, it pushed the sector further away to the end of the table – a table set up by, ironically, the “journalists of color.”
To the organizers, the absence of discussion focused on ethnic media in the five-day convention was because they didn’t receive any proposals related to that subject when submissions were open last year, according to Onica Mikwakwa, executive director of the UNITY: Journalists of Color, Inc, an umbrella organization of black, Asians, Native American and Latino journalists, mostly working in mainstream media.
The organizer of this once-in-every-four-year event sent out a call in July, 2007 and started getting proposals from media members in independent, mainstream or non-profit fields in August. By September, they selected and decided which proposals would appear in the programs. Among some 600 workshop proposals received, UNITY picked 103.
“If you want to see more workshops about Latino media, you need to submit a proposal,” Mikwakwa said. “You need to own the programming. If we see 14 proposed workshops on the same subject, it says something important about itself.” But she added that she didn’t have the data about how many proposals on ethnic media were received, if there’s any at all.
Even without a dedicated program, during each workshop, the panelists were free to bring up any issues for discussion, and certainly ethnic media, said Mikwakwa.
Unfortunately, ethnic media wasn’t the “Sexy Back” to most panelists.
To many speakers, it seemed to be cool to talk about ethnic in media, but not without the preposition. Often, it was only in the Q&A sessions when someone in the audience demanded a direct address of this particular media sector, the panelists would “touch base” on the subject.
For example, during the Q&A session of “Is Change in the Air: 1968 to 2008 and Beyond, How Race has Changed America” on the second day of UNITY, in response to a question posted by the New York Community Media Alliance about why ethnic media was sidelined and unuttered in the one and a half hour long discussion about journalists of color, Helen Zia, journalist-writer and the former executive editor of Ms. Magazine, said she agreed that “UNITY should be more aware of [the] ethnic press.”
At the same time, Dori Maynard, president of Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education who also appeared on the panel, argued that the statement was “not true” because ethnic media is “important” and “growing.”
Yet, if it is so, why was it missing in the discussion?
Apparently, if we trace the history of some of the oldest ethnic newspapers in this country, the El Diario La Prensa – a merger of El Diario de Nueva York established in 1947 and La Prensa in 1913 – was created in 1963, the World Journal was founded in 1976, and the New York Amsterdam News was founded as early as 1909. Their very existence in the specified time frame – 1968 to 2008 – is evidence that they contributed to the race factor that has changed the United States.
If we take one step further by looking at the circulation of ethnic newspapers, the three major Spanish language daily newspapers – La Opinion, El Diario La Prensa and El Nuevo Herald – all but El Nuevo Herald recorded a surge of readership in 2007, according to a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The three newspapers serve a total of approximately 253,970 Hispanic readers every day.
For this election year, the efforts to cover the campaigns by ethnic press are tremendous. In a recent televised panel discussion produced by Manhattan Neighborhood Network and New York Community Media Alliance on the topic of ethnic media in presidential election, all four panelists – the bureau chief of India Express Sujeet Rajan, the national desk editor of World Journal Joe Wei, the former political chief correspondent of Forward Jennifer Siegel and the op-ed editor of El Diario La Prensa Erica Gonzalez – said their affiliated news organizations did their best to produce a comprehensive coverage, especially in analyzing the candidates’ foreign policy perspectives since it is one of the major concerns by immigrants. The four newspapers are main source of information for Indian, Chinese, Jewish and Hispanic voters.
With the history, number and potential laying in front of us, it is especially discouraging to hear statements such as “[ethnic media] is not being looked at enough,” as noted by Anita Malik, editor and chief of East West magazine, during the Q&A session of “Cultural Competency: Turning Theory into Action” on the third day of UNITY.
But one thing for sure is that, everyone in ethnic media should start thinking about what proposal to submit for UNITY 2012.
