Karl Rove gets it. So do major advertisers, broadcast networks, and their

Karl Rove gets it. So do major advertisers, broadcast networks, and their digital offspring. To be a viable political or commercial force in America’s future, you must be able to understand and connect with an audience that is heavily made up of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.

No surprise there, right?

Then why is there a paucity of research, education and funding aimed at producing excellent journalists and sustainable news outlets to serve that important and expanding audience? Why is ethnic media still relatively invisible to media analysts, foundations and journalism schools, and what are the costs to us if this trend continues?

New York City is, admittedly, an extreme example of media diversity: Three million residents — 37 percent of the population — are foreign-born, and less than a quarter of those residents report speaking only English at home. Not surprisingly, there’s a vibrant ecosystem of ethnic media to serve a population that speaks more than 170 languages. But a version of New York’s mishmash exists in suburbs and small towns across America. Multicultural media are everywhere.

So it’s puzzling that we still hear (including from my esteemed colleague Jeff Jarvis) about the declining fortunes of New York’s “three daily newspapers” when there are 18 dailies serving the city, nine of which are published in languages other than English. Some are simply reprinting news about their home countries and offer little local coverage. But many, like the Chinese-language World Journal or El Diario-La Prensa, offer page after page of local news and have reporting staffs that would be the envy of many metro dailies. The combined circulation of these 18 dailies exceeds 500,000. (By contrast, the New York Daily News delivers about 270,000 papers to the city’s five boroughs.)

To get our arms around this sub-set of the local media sector, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Center for Community and Ethnic Media recently conducted a survey. The resulting directory, Many Voices, One City, includes information about 270 community and ethnic outlets that produce news in 36 languages, whether for print, radio, TV, or the web. We know there are many more such news outlets and we intend to keep adding to our soon-to-be-released online version of the directory.

Buried in our findings were some interesting nuggets: Of the 270 outlets, 31 cater to Latino audiences; the Pakistani community can choose from nine news outlets. And though the most recent U.S. Census identified just 7,000 Nepali residents in the city, the local Nepali community is served by three newspapers, one of which distributes 7,000 copies every fortnight. Overall, the sector remains active: In the last two years, for instance, there were 21 new entrants.

Unfortunately, there is little research about the business models of these ethnic and community publications. Anecdotally, however, they look and feel very different from the ones that are often the subject of media analysis. Sixty percent of those we surveyed have no circulation revenue; they rely almost exclusively on local advertising. Nearly half publish weekly newspapers, earning praise from advertisers who like the fact that the papers lie on kitchen tables for days at a time, available to multiple readers of households that are often multigenerational.

Although most of the city’s daily and weekly ethnic and community newspapers have nascent websites, many publishers tell us they see little point in devoting additional resources to them. They cite the lousy economics: the high cost of investment and editorial commitment in relation to a tiny revenue stream.

Are these publishers ignoring industry trends at their peril, or does one size not fit all? We know from other research that nearly half of the owners of the city’s small businesses — potential local advertisers — are foreign-born. And we also know that a high percentage of those small businesses — over 85 percent, according to one survey — have no presence of their own online. But without more detailed research and analysis, it’s hard to know what this all means for ethnic and community media outlets and their business strategies. Therein lies opportunity.

To begin serving the needs of this market segment, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism decided several years ago to launch an ethnic and community media initiative. We were encouraged to do so by Garry Pierre-Pierre, the founding publisher and editor of the Haitian Times. He understood the sector and its limitations, and believed the J-School could be an important force in strengthening it. Thanks to his foresight — and grants from the Ford Foundation and several other funders — we launched our Center for Community and Ethnic Media last fall. Pierre-Pierre is now its executive director.

Under the Center’s umbrella, we’ve begun to raise the visibility of this media sector with our website, Voices of NY, which curates (translating from 12 languages) the best stories published daily by 90-plus publications that we regularly review. The city’s commissioner of immigrant affairs, Fatima Shama, has called Voices an invaluable resource. To showcase the best work being produced by this sector, the J-School hosts an annual journalism awards competition called the Ippies. We were fortunate to inherit both Voices and the Ippies from the New York Community Media Alliance, a nonprofit that offered to transfer them to the J-School when it began running out of steam in early 2011.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/07/ethnic-media-is-more-than-a-niche-its-worth-your-attention/