Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | New Americans, Fresh Off the Presses, page 3

The Haitian Times claims a dozen staffers and has paid reporters in Miami and Haiti, but a number of functions, including some writing and editing, are performed by volunteers.

Pierre-Pierre spends his time juggling business and journalistic obligations, and when a potential advertiser is on the phone he takes the call personally, although he insists he doesn’t let this influence the paper’s coverage. “We don’t accept ads that are tied up to a story,” he said in a recent interview. “We don’t accept money to write stories. We write stories because we believe they’re worth printing.”

The remarkable July 24, 2002 issue of the Haitian Times was full of such stories, including one about the rise of Haitian-American Republicans; a follow-up on the case of Abner Louima; a profile of an up-and-coming Haitian-American middleweight boxer; an essay about Alexandre Dumas on the occasion of his 200th birthday; a couple of articles about immigration; an account of the abduction and beating of an investigative reporter in Haiti; an Associated Press story about the collapse of a Haitian banking scheme that cost some depositors their life savings; Haitian entertainment listings for Haiti as well as America; TV and radio listings; a horoscope, a gossip column, an advice column and a recipe for Haitian cabbage rolls.

The cover story of that same issue, about the mysterious “suicide” of a young Haitian-American entrepreneur near Buffalo, New York, was written by Macollvie Jean-Francois, a wry and energetic novice Pierre-Pierre hired as a college student. She has since developed into a mainstay of the paper. That’s another of the ethnic media’s unsung roles: providing jobs and training for journalists covering communities unlikely to get much ink in the mainstream media.

Passions and Divisions

The idealism of editors like Pierre-Pierre notwithstanding, it’s easy to idealize America’s ethnic press, but by and large these are not great papers; most have small news budgets and editorial staffs, and this lack of resources makes it almost impossible for them to conduct the kind of in-depth enterprise reporting required to expose corruption or thoroughly cover complex issues. Even La Opinión, which communications professor Federico Subervi of Pace University calls “the most sophisticated and complete of the Spanish-language dailies in the country,” doesn’t have a regular city hall reporter and finds it impossible to closely cover labor. About five years ago, perhaps as a reflection of staffing constraints, it went off the beat system altogether.

Subervi blames the media—mainstream and Latino—for the low electoral participation of Latinos, noting that in Puerto Rico and Mexico, to cite a couple of examples, voter turnout is much higher than it is here among native-born Americans, never mind naturalized Latino voters. “The current Latino ethnic media are doing a lukewarm job in promoting the political knowledge and participation of Latinos,” he says. “It could be a lot better, and it should be a lot better.”

The media can make the difference, he says, citing Miami’s Cuban immigrants. When they first arrived, they had low political participation, but when Dade County adopted an English-only ordinance for government purposes in 1980 (it was later rolled back), a local Spanish-language TV station was able to galvanize Cuban political energies around the slogan “Vota para que te respeten” (Vote to be respected). The Abner Louima case had a similar effect on Brooklyn’s Haitians, according to Pierre-Pierre.

This is not to say ethnic papers stand apart from politics, although they sometimes stand apart from American politics. In general, among ethnic papers, “the content is much more advocacy-oriented towards a particular world view or perspective shaped by the conditions of the community, albeit filtered through the part of the community most represented by the paper and the owner’s perspective,” says John Anner, executive director of the Independent Press Association.

Ethnic papers often reflect the passions and divisions of the home country. In Brooklyn, for instance, Pierre-Pierre says, there is a Haitian paper identified with the pro-Aristede forces, and another considered anti-Aristede. Both are in French. Most of California’s dozens of Vietnamese-language papers, on the other hand, are strongly anti-Communist, like their readers, yet here, too, there are sharp divisions. Five Vietnamese immigrant journalists have been murdered since 1981 while doing their jobs in this country, according to Jeff Brody, a Cal State Fullerton journalism professor who has studied these newspapers. Their deaths were part of a climate of political violence surrounding the Vietnamese media in this country as a result of tensions between conciliatory factions and anti-Communist extremists, says Brody, who notes that while Vietnam has no tradition of a free press, Vietnamese-American journalists quickly adapted to ours. The violence has subsided in the past decade or so as Vietnamese immigrants have accepted the idea that the Communist regime is more likely to collapse of its own contradictions than as a result of violent overthrow.

Even in the absence of murder, journalistic ethics are sometimes a problem in the ethnic press. Kang & Lee, a New York-based advertising agency that specializes in the Asian-American market, warns, in its online Asian Media Reference Guide, “that there is a very close relationship between the advertising sales and the editorial departments of these media… In fact, many publications allocate editorial space according to the advertising volume of the client.” Kang & Lee urges clients to leverage their ad spending to get more editorial coverage, but warns clients not to be surprised by a shakedown, either: such publications may use their editorial clout to pry some ad dollars out of you, “perhaps even threatening to print a negative article regarding your company or product, or heavily endorsing your competitors.”

Challenges and Change
If the ethnic media has its ethical lapses, well, plenty of mainstream newspapers are beholden to their advertisers too, especially to the holy trinity of supermarkets, auto dealers and real estate agents. On the other hand, they don’t provide the kind of coverage the ethnic papers do. Last year, for instance, India-West, a 25,000-circulation weekly in San Leandro, California, made national news by reporting that McDonald’s was using beef extract to flavor its French fries—anathema to the Hindus who make up the bulk of the paper’s readers. Vegetarians were appalled and a class-action suit was filed against the fast-food chain. A McDonald’s in India was even vandalized.

One of the challenges facing every ethnic publication in acculturating immigrants is keeping up with evolving readers. Brody says that when Vietnamese-language newspapers first sprang up to serve new immigrants in California’s Orange County, they provided news of the homeland, news of the growing local Vietnamese community, and also information about negotiating the place they had come to live. That means information about English classes, becoming a citizen, American holidays and how to enroll your children in school. But Brody says that as the Vietnamese community became more established, the Vietnamese newspapers became less focused on matters of civics. Instead they expanded feature coverage of celebrities, movies and fashion.

No matter how much their readers change, one thing that doesn’t change in the ethnic media is the need to explain world events to their readers. When terrorists attacked New York’s World Trade Center, for example, workers and residents in the nearby Chinatown section of Manhattan turned to Sinocast, a radio station that broadcasts over 92.3 FM. Sinocast listeners must have a specially adapted radio to pick up the station, but such devices are sold by the station and local stores, and by September 11, 2001, they were common all over the neighborhood.

Next page: Across the country, you can find similar radios under the palm trees of West Hollywood, California, a center of the 600,000 Russian-speaking immigrants who have settled in Southern California.

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