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NYC's Ethnic Press

by Abby Scher

When the police killed Patrick Dorismond last year, the mainstream New York dailies certainly covered the uproar that followed . But they did not report about it the way New York City's four Haitian newspapers did. The Haitian papers went beyond the incident involving Dorismond, who was a Haitian immigrant, to chronicle the community's growing frustration at its lack of political clout in challenging the police. At a town meeting last April, reported by the weekly English language paper Haitian Times, civic leaders asked why, despite a local population of more than 300,000, Haitians had not managed to elect a single major public official.

This year, the Haitian papers are writing about the two Haitian candidates vying for Una Clarke's seat on the City Council, and the two other Haitians running for Lloyd Henry's City Council seat.

Indeed, the call for political clout echoes through out the astonishing number of mostly new ethnic newspapers and magazines in the city, as they all gear up to cover "hometown" candidates.

The results could be surprising, because there is an unprecedented boom in New York's ethnic press. At least 198 magazines and newspapers are now publishing in 36 languages. There are seven New York daily newspapers in Chinese! Readers come from more than 50 nations or ethnic groups. These are mostly immigrants, but there has been a spurt in publications for long-settled African-American and Latino readers as well.

Dailies Web Site Circulation Ethnic Group
World Journal   360,000 (nationally); 134,400 (East Coast) Chinese
Daily Challenge thedailychallenge.com 81,630 Black
America Oggi   65,000 (nationally); 23,000 (NYC) Italian
Novoye Russkoye Slovo www.nrs.com 55,000 Russian
El Diario   54,500** Latino
Hoy   50,300** Latino
Sing Tao www.singtao.com 50,000 Chinese
El Nacional   44,000 Dominican
Korea Times   40,000 Korean
China Press www.chinapress.com 40,000 Chinese
* from Audit Bureau of Circulation as of September 2000 

This is the largest number of ethnic publications in the city's history. By contrast, during the last great wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, one scholar counted just 146 immigrant newspapers

THE RISE

There are more than three million immigrants in New York City, half a million of whom arrived in the four years after 1992, when Congress passed a diversity law that allowed in large numbers from nations where few had come before. They came from Bangladesh and Egypt, from China and the Philippines, from countries in Africa and from the former Soviet republics.

And, supported by a steadily growing economy, all these groups created their own publications. New York has become the ethnic media capital of the world. It is not just New Yorkers who read these New York-based newspapers. So do immigrants who live in areas where their numbers are too small to support a local paper.

Though there are more ethnic newspapers now in New York than a century ago, their circulation is general lower than the papers from the past. Some of the old Yiddish and Italian papers from the turn of the century could have a million readers. No Spanish-language daily has a circulation over 70,000, and all seven Chinese language dailies have a combined circulation of half a million.

Weeklies
Web Site 
Circulation 
Jewish Herald   288,000
Algemeiner Journal (Yiddish)   250,000
Caribbean Life (free)   125,000
Jewish Press   96,000
Irish Voice   88,000
Haiti Observateur www.haiti-observateur.com 75,000
U.S. Frontline (Japanese)   69,800
La Voz Hispana   68,000
NY Carib News www.nycaribnews.com 67,000
Irish Echo www.irishecho.com 65,000

Still, the increase has been dramatic. The same Chinese papers had only 170,000 readers a decade ago. The number of Polish and Russian language newspapers has grown easily by a third since then. The Indian community, which had one newspaper 25 years ago, now has at least eight, with a combined circulation of 212,300.

On the right newsstand, you will find a choice of newspapers for Jamaicans (Weekly Gleaner, or Weekly Star), Guyanese (Guyana Monitor), Dominican (El Nacional), Filipino (there are four), and Ecuadorian (Ecuador News), all written and published in the metropolitan area.

THE BLACK PRESS

Unnoticed by outsiders, the African press of New York has grown astronomically to five magazines and three newspapers.

But it is not just newspapers for black immigrants that have flourished. While some cities have no black newspapers, the 24 percent of New Yorkers who are African American have a choice of ten, including The Daily Challenge, a black daily that also caters to Caribbean and African immigrants. 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.

Many of 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 SPANISH-LANGUAGE PRESS

The 29 percent 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.

Dailies by Ethnic Group  
Chinese 7
Latino 4
Polish 3
Korean 3
Greek 2
Russian 1
Italian 1
Black 1

INDEPENDENT -- FOR NOW

While corporations own 86 percent of English-language newspapers in the United States, many ethnic publications continue to follow the path of family-owned papers and invest whatever they earn back into their enterprise.

This is not always the case. Media companies in Taiwan and Hong Kong own the major Chinese papers in New York. Last year, the Greek daily Proini sold a major ownership stake to a Greek newspaper company. The small Courier Life chain in Brooklyn runs a free Caribbean paper, Caribbean Life (with a circulation of 125,000) 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 New York 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 even have their own radio or television stations, including the News India-Times.

But in general the ethnic media, unlike that of the English-speaking world, is independent, and not so profitable. There are a number of ethnic newspapermen, like Safieelvin Dyab, the editor of Astoria's Arab Post, who support their newspaper by holding down another job (as a correspondent for the BBC), because the ad world has not yet discovered them.

Frequency of Ethnic Publications  
Dailies 24
Thrice weekly 2
Weeklies 98
Twice monthly 20
Monthly 24
Bimonthly 10
Quarterly 7
irregular 3
Twice yearly 1
Total 189

POLITICS AND THE 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-language press.

Often, though, ethnic newspapers and magazines wind up building potent communities, and promoting a political consciousness, even if they are not consciously trying to.

Sometimes this happens simply because they are catering to their readers' needs and interests. 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. Some immigrant newspapers aggressively cover labor problems that are only given token coverage in the mainstream press. Two of the seven Bangladeshi newspapers (Weekly Thikana and New Probashi) are known for their quality reporting on the dangers faced by construction workers as well as other day workers.

By covering the news of the entire home region, the papers often dissolve distinctions that had been active back home, creating a broader solidarity. This is a process that happened early in the 20th century, when large New York dailies treated their readers as immigrants from "Italy" or "Germany" -- not from Genoa, Naples or Saxony.

The editors also often prod their readers to lobby the federal government on policies affecting their home country. Karl Rodney, editor in chief of Carib News, listed international trade as a major area of news interest. The feds backed the "wrong side" in the banana dispute in the World Trade Organization, says Rodney, which challenged Europe's favored trade with Caribbean banana producers, and now the industry in three island countries is threatened.

But the ethnic press is not just urging action back home. Many publications interpret American life for their readers, chronicle the struggles of the immigrants here -- and take an active role in helping their readers think of themselves 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.

If the new immigrant press is largely less ideological than papers published by earlier immigrants (there was an Italian language anarchist paper into the 1970s), it still often retains a political cast. The Caribbean press tends to be centrist to conservative. (Progressives in that community might pick up the Daily Challenge). Haitians have a choice of a conservative, two centrist and a progressive paper. Many of the Latin American weeklies are more conservative than the two daily Spanish-language powerhouses, Hoy and El Diario. But there are also progressive weeklies such as La Voz de Queens and La Voz de Mexico.

Whatever their views, the near future will determine just how effective their politics really are. The fall elections will demonstrate whether they have the power to help elect public officials who directly represent the 40 percent of New Yorkers who now are immigrants.

Abby Scher is a sociologist and director of the Independent Press Association-New York. She is coeditor of Many Voices, One City, a directory of the ethnic press in New York

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