Half a world away from Kosovo, there’s another kind of ethnic turf struggle being waged—in San Jose, Calif. And it’s getting nastier by the second.

“This is war,” Nam Nguyen, publisher of Calitoday, insisted to me the other day over the phone.

Nguyen is one of a handful of Vietnamese publishers who target the growing Vietnamese community in Northern California, estimated to number 120,000 in the San Jose area alone. His declaration is a sign that ethnic media has arrived, a thorn at the side of the mainstream.

But then, you know the power of ethnic media. You’re reading it.

For years, mom and pop publishers like Nguyen took care of the community’s love of news and the printed word. It was ethnic media in its most fundamental and traditional sense—news of the local community activities, but mixed in with important news of the old country. It was the stuff, rarely reported beyond a paragraph or two in the mainstream press, that satisfied a real hunger for information among Vietnamese Americans. Who else will tell you of the speculation behind the activities of the leader of a Buddhist church banned by the Vietnamese government? Where else will you read about the making of the Vietnamese beauty queen? The Vietnamese ethnic media were hitting their target dead on. Readers were bypassing the established media and going direct to the small papers.

But now with the increased immigration of Vietnamese, and the establishment of more than 5,000 Vietnamese businesses in Santa Clara County, it’s no longer easy for the mainstream to ignore the community’s needs.

The Vietnamese market means money. And that’s always worth a war in America.

San Jose is a traditional American media monopoly town. One newspaper for everyone, like it or not. In San Jose, the paper of record is the Knight-Ridder chain’s Mercury News. It’s not the 300 pound gorilla. It’s the 3,000-pound gorilla.

That’s not to say the Merc is all that bad. In fact, it does a better job than most at being “all things, to all people.” Being in the heart of Silicon Valley, the paper often has the robotic feel of a technical journal, so given its huge Latino community, it spun off a Spanish weekly, Nuevo Mundo. Then it decided that as the standard-bearer of journalism in the city, it should also be the Vietnamese paper for the region—one with Vietnamese staffers, editors, and sales people. Viet Merc was born.

When the mainstream goes ethnic, you’re asking for trouble. It’s the guerillas versus the gorilla in the battle for the Vietnamese reader.

According to Calitoday’s Nguyen, the Mercury came in and went for the jugular. It immediately created an unlevel playing field for competitors by cutting ad rates and offering low initial rates to advertisers. If the mom and pops were estimating that normal operating costs ran at $300 a page, the Merc’s introductory rates came in as low as $45 for a full page ad.

Many advertisers switched over. And publishers like Nguyen were gloomily predicting that more than one of the mom and pops would go out of business.

I’ve talked to Jay Harris, the smart, soft-spoken publisher of the Mercury News, and he’s denied any underhanded tactics. To Harris, it’s just hardball free-market competition. The Mercury wants to win every reader. And Vietnamese journalists, who came over in boats seeking freedom, understand any kind of Darwinian notion you throw at them. They vow to keep up the fight.

But when I talked to Nguyen last week, he seemed less concerned about the financial battle and more upset with what he sensed as a paternal, colonial mentality by the Merc.

“The community doesn’t like it,” he said on the phone. “There could be protests.”

The passing mention of protest is not to be taken lightly in the Vietnamese community. You’ll recall just a few weeks ago, the hundreds of people who protested in Southern California’s Little Saigon over a store owner’s display of a poster of Ho Chi Minh.
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If it’s another Vietnam over media turf in San Jose, maybe the victor can use the old war to win the new one. Perhaps the victor will be the publisher who will win the readers’ “hearts and minds?”

It doesn’t have to be so gory. This week at the San Francisco Fairmont, the American Society of Newspaper Editors will hold its annual convention. ASNE’s record has not been the greatest. It rolled back modest affirmative action goals for newspapers last year. But this year, the need for diversity has hit them in the face. Among the sessions: “It’s Your Future: Economic Imperatives of Changing Audiences.” Essentially this is the session where white newspapers are forced to realize the new color of readers in America. It isn’t white.

Not surprisingly, the two speakers are the publishers of the two California dailies that are establishing models. First, there’s Knight-Ridder’s Harris, who takes a free market, “we can do Vietnamese better” approach with the Viet Merc. It’s the journalistic purveyor going global. Or imperial.

Then there’s Times Mirror chair Mark Willes, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. His is a far more cooperative, and less threatening approach. The Times hasn’t taken over the ethnic media. It’s bought into it. In the last few years, Times Mirror has partnered with both an existing regional Vietnamese paper and a Latino newspaper, La Opinion. Acrimony was kept to a minimum.

Two models. Two ways of tapping in to emerging markets. One way is more zero-sum than the other. More paternal, more colonial. Standard mainstream corporate-think. The kind that lead to declarations of war. The other way is slightly more community-friendly. Partners, not competitors.

Between the two, the most successful model will no doubt set a standard for a changing newspaper industry that’s slowly realizing demographics don’t lie. Whites are a minority. The ethnic media services a hot market. Mainstream newspapers need a much greater ethnic presence, especially in the New California. But clearly, there’s a right way, and a wrong way. Especially if one wants to avoid a war.