Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 3

Home of the first ethnic paper, Philadelphia has a world of diversity.

By Wendy Tanaka
Inquirer Staff Writer

One story describes the Miss Brazil USA pageant's local competition; the winner, Janaisa Daiana Barbosa, 22, of Northeast Philadelphia, will compete for the title in Fort Lauderdale next month.

Another story reports in detail on a Brazilian pizza delivery man shot and killed in Olney.

Another exposes a corrupt congressman in Brazil.

These articles were front-page news in Brazilian News Week, a free, weekly Portuguese-language newspaper published in Northeast Philadelphia, which caters to the region's 40,000 Brazilians.

"People need to know what's going on in the city and to feel comfortable reading in Portuguese," said Aiton Santos, the paper's editor.

Santos, 40, a Brazilian who has lived in Philadelphia since 1999, said his paper prints 15,000 copies weekly, and is enjoying dramatic advertising growth: The number of local businesses that advertise has increased from three to 25 since 2000, when he founded the paper. And the paper now runs ads from 50 major corporations, including Comcast Corp., Sprint Nextel and PNC Bank.

When mainstream American newspapers are losing circulation and advertising revenue, many ethnic newspapers in the United States are flourishing -- reaching 51 million readers, or about one-quarter of the U.S. adult population, according to a survey released in June by New California Media, an association of ethnic media organizations.

New papers aimed at African American, Hispanic, Asian and European communities have been popping up, and their circulations and ad revenue are climbing. According to New California Media, about 1,000 ethnic papers publish or have bureaus in the United States.

That figure might have pleased Benjamin Franklin, who founded the nation's first ethnic newspaper, the German-language Philadelphische Zeitung, in Germantown in 1732.

Today dozens of ethnic papers call Philadelphia home, including Philadelphia Tribune, the venerable black paper; Dong-A Daily News, a Korean-language paper that employs 20 people in Elkins Park; Spanish-language Al Dia; Little Saigon News, a free Vietnamese weekly; and Russian Market Newspaper, a weekly paper published in Northeast Philadelphia.

"As long as there's immigration happening, the ethnic media will grow," said Sandip Roy, an editor at Pacific News Service, an alternative news organization in San Francisco that founded New California Media.

"It serves as a bridge for immigrant and mainstream communities. The papers will spend a lot of time reporting on ethnic communities in an intimate way that mainstream papers can't do."

Roy noted that ethnic papers also provide a much-needed context, "a way for ethnic communities to understand the larger mainstream society that they're a part of. And they understand their position in the larger community."

Typically, ethnic papers will focus on people and events in their communities, celebrating individual accomplishments and offering advice for living and working in America.

For instance, although mainstream media, including The Inquirer and Daily News, covered the 2001 death of Brazilian immigrant and pizza delivery man Joao Nascimento, who was fatally shot by a customer who had intended to rob him, Brazilian News Week ran two front-page stories and involved the community. The paper marshalled the efforts of local Brazilian businesses and community members to send Nascimento's body back to Brazil for burial.

Similarly, Dong-A Daily News, which was founded in Korea in 1920 and has been publishing a Philadelphia edition since 1980, ran a recent front-page story on the 30th anniversary celebration of the Philip Jaisohn Memorial Foundation -- commonly known as Jaisohn Center -- a social services organization in Philadelphia's East Oak Lane area that assists the Korean community.

"Philip Jaisohn was the first Korean medical doctor in the U.S.," Dong-A Daily News president David Lim said.

"The Korean community had a big celebration at the Hilton" on City Avenue, which the mainstream media did not cover.

Ethnic newspapers also provide a different perspective on global issues. The heated debate on outsourcing labor is one example.

"For the mainstream, the debate is framed in terms of American jobs at stake, of patriotic American companies versus 'Benedict Arnold CEOs,' " said Prem Panicker, editor of India Abroad, an English-language paper that publishes 45,000 copies weekly in the United States.

Panicker said that for most Indians in India, the outsourcing issue is treated more matter-of-factly: what companies are outsourcing, what facilities are opening and where, and how many jobs are being created.

Ethnic papers say their readers trust their coverage because the stories are written by journalists who are also part of the community.

"We strongly believe that no one can tell our story like us," said Philadelphia Tribune's president and chief executive officer, Robert Bogle.

Panicker said mainstream coverage could be superficial, "seduced by Bhangra music, Bollywood and curry.

"The mainstream media is missing out on an opportunity."

Circulation and advertising figures for ethnic papers are difficult to come by. But in New York City alone, the number of papers has risen from 30 to 115 since 2001, and circulation has more than tripled, from less than one million to about three million, during the same period, said Scott Verchin, director of network advertising at the Independent Press Association.

Kang & Lee, a New York advertising agency that links corporate advertisers with Asian media outlets, estimated that ad revenue for all Asian media was $500 million to $600 million in 2004, compared with $300 million to $400 million in the late 1990s.

Target Market News, a Chicago-based firm that tracks African American marketing and media, estimated that ad revenue for black papers is slightly more than $600 million annually. The company did not have figures from the past.

According to Latino Print Network, a Carlsbad, Calif., research company, ad revenue for Hispanic newspapers totaled about $923 million in 2004, compared with $854 million for 2003 and $596 million for 2000.

That is still just a fraction of the mainstream media's $100 billion to $200 billion a year, said Saul Gitlin, a Kang & Lee executive vice president. But in contrast to other media, the trends are generally up.

So much so that established ethnic papers are trying to plan how to handle some of the problems mainstream media face. Many ethnic papers have benefited from the increased circulation that the current immigration surge makes possible, although, as their communities assimilate and become fluent in English, their readers may be harder to retain.

Bogle, the Philadelphia Tribune CEO, said "we've been challenged by the same things" as mainstream media.

He said people read less, and readers rely on other media: TV, cable, the Internet. "The written word is still king, but I believe we're going to have to make some changes."

Lim, the Dong-A Daily News president, predicts that he can continue to maintain circulation till 2010, "but it depends on newcomers coming in."