Asian American Print Media—Proliferation and Problems
By Debbi Gardiner

Carrie Chang has always despaired about the content of the mainstream APA press. “I was turned off by a lot of the soft, entertainment-driven journalism that is so common in Asian American magazines. I am more curious about the psychological aspects of Asian Americans as opposed to who Russell Wong is dating,” Chang said. So last year, Chang, a 29-year old freelance writer, former editor and graduate from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, decided to launch her own magazine entitled Monolid (www.monolid.com).

Chang’s vision was to address the cultural and political issues of Asian Americans, nationwide. “The Asian population was hungry for a magazine that had some political kick to it, that wasn’t afraid to shout if necessary, and [that] unabashedly embraced a form of Asian nationalism, “ said Chang. Now in its third issue, Monolid is available by subscription nationwide and is also sold in bookstores in Washington D.C., New York and Northern California.

After a year of productions, Monolid’s current circulation is around 2,000, including bookstore sales and subscriptions. “I would be happy [growing circulation] to 5,000, increasing distribution nationwide, and upping the quality of the magazine in the next five years by hiring more reporters and artists,” said Chang.

And Monolid is only one of the plentiful crop of Asian American magazines sprouting up in bookstores across the U.S.

Times Have Changed

Asian American print media was in its infancy as recent as a decade ago. Bill Imada, CEO of Imada Wong Communications, a marketing firm specializing in Asian Pacific American communities, said that “ten years ago, the only real APA newspaper in Southern California was Rafu Shimpo. This was viewed as the best source for news information on the Asian American community.” On the magazine side, Rice also offered a fresh view of the Asian American experience, but according to Imada, it eventually folded because it failed to attract mainstream advertisers.

Today, there are Asian American print publications addressing almost every segment of the Asian American population. “From ten years ago, Asian American print media has increased 300 percent to over 600 print and broadcast in-language media organizations and is still growing,” said Imada.

Imada added that 500 of these organizations specialize in print media and over 100 are in English. And those figures don’t even include Asian American and Internet magazines, or “e-zines,” which Imada estimates are starting up at a rate of one a day.

API Print Leaders

The leaders in the API print community today can each boast at least five years in business and considerable circulation growth—A. Magazine, Yolk, Pacific Citizen, Filipinas, Transpacific, Giant Robot, Asian Sun News, Asian Enterprise and AsianWeek.

Giant Robot is a Los Angeles-based magazine that takes a pop culture approach to the Asian American community. Founded in 1994 at 240 copies, Robot now claims a circulation of 25,000. “Last year it was at 20,000. Our magazine incrementally grows every issue… thousands are added,” said editor Eric Nakamura. Twenty-one years strong, AsianWeek has seen its circulation climb from 30,000 in 1997 to over 50,000 in 2000. Its offices now include Los Angeles as well as the San Francisco Bay Area.

And A. Magazine, a lifestyle glossy based in New York City, touts a circulation increase of approximately 50 percent in just four years, from 125,000 to 180,000 readers between 1994 and 1998. According to former editor Angelo Regaza, the magazine, now enjoying its ten-year anniversary, has a circulation of 200,000.

Other ethnic categories of print media are flourishing as well. “If you take the African American magazines, like the emergence of CODE magazine, a new fashion magazine for African American men, [they are] doing very well. Latina magazine is also doing extremely well in terms of ad sales and circulation,” said Regaza. B.Smith Style—a magazine launched by African American restaurant owner, cookbook writer and former model Barbara Smith—is like a multi-cultural “Martha Stewart Living,” said Regaza. B. Smith Style boasts a circulation of 2 million, she added.

Why the Proliferation?

The reasons behind the growing numbers of Asian American print media come in many layers. Many API editors say the proliferation of ethnic print media mirrors the demographic shift in the United States. “The U.S. is no longer going to be majority white—the ethnic populations are exploding in size and buying power. Asian Americans are going to be one in every ten Americans by 2050,” said Regaza. Next year, Regaza will launch his own fashion and beauty magazine for the Asian American market, called Elements.

Studies also show that Asian Americans read considerably more books and magazines than the average American, creating a huge demand for Asian focused material. In 1998, Simmons Research reported that Asian Americans are 71 percent more likely to read a fashion magazine than the average American consumer. And New York-based Media Mark Research found that Vogue and other lifestyle magazines have a high proportion of Asian readers.

Regaza also said the recent explosion in API print media correlates with higher expectations of the Asian American population and its finicky desires. “Because Asian Americans consume more magazines they see the wider selection of what is out there and they are therefore very picky with Asian American media.”

Imada agrees with Regaza’s assessment, saying that the quality of the editorial, layout, the style and design and level of advertising support has improved significantly because both advertisers and Asian American consumers are demanding it. “The APA press has had to reflect the changing interests of the Asian American communities,” Imada said.

Nakamura said that while Giant Robot’s content hasn’t changed significantly, their circulation has increased and the ethnic breakdown of their readership has gone from mostly non-Asian to 50-50 Asian/Non Asians. Nakamura says these shifts have resulted from improved quality in Robot’s writing, layout and graphics. “A lot of APA readers were not willing to pick up our magazine until we went from a staple and fold punk rock xerox-zine to a thicker glossy magazine,” Nakamura said.

Regaza said that while A. Magazine’s readership has always been Asian, in making it glossier and more commercial the magazine became more acceptable to Asian Americans. “In 1994, I made the change to all color from cover to cover. We went from saddle stitching to perfect binding and shifted our focus from identity politics and activism in 1994 to a more lifestyle-oriented content. Then the readership went up by 50 percent,” Regaza said.

Mainstream Advertising

And mainstream advertisers have followed alongside the increased popularity of Asian American print media. Many API magazines have recently enjoyed landmark years in advertising sales. “Overall, compared to five years ago mainstream advertisers attitudes towards ethnic press seem to be warming,” said Karen Wang, associate publisher of A. Magazine. “A. Magazine is definitely getting more corporate advertisers like American Express, Absolute Vodka, BMW and Ford Motor Company.”

“The landscape of America and advertising has changed— essentially, Asian Americans are being better represented in the different fields like technology, business and entertainment and that has fueled the advertisers’ interest in outreaching to this particular market,” Wang continued.

Dot-com companies are also a key factor in the increase in ad sales. Giant Robot’s advertising representative, Lisa Strouss, said the dot-coms are becoming one of Robot’s major advertising segments. “Click 2 Asia, Japanese Snacks.com, Listen.com have been advertising with us since last year and I sense that this is a trend that will start to grow. It may be that our magazine covers a lot of stories related to the Internet. It’s gone up maybe 50 percent since the Internet boom,” Strouss said.

Michael Tarbox, AsianWeek’s associate publisher, says that overall, it is becoming easier to break through to mainstream advertisers. Nordstrom spokesperson Deniz Anders said that Nordstrom—a regular advertiser in Asian Enterprise and AsianWeek—advertises with the ethnic press because the company appreciates the richness that diversity brings to its business.

But even with the increased advertising attention, the “perishability” rate—or the rate at which new publications fail—for ethnic press remains high, because capturing mainstream advertisers is still difficult. Tarbox complains that many advertisers want to “get it” but miss the mark. “A lot of our advertisers say that ‘if we want to target Chinese people, why don’t we place an ad in a Chinese newspaper?’” But by doing so, advertisers miss a large portion of the Asian American community—APIs whose primary language is English.

Challenges Faced by API Media

Along with the “mainstreaming” of ethnic media comes dissatisfaction among the API readership. Readers’ recurring complaints seem to be that the mainstream API press is ‘too cute,’ ‘too girly’ and ‘too white.’ Joanne Lau, a 24-year-old marketing associate for a San Francisco media start-up, says she prefers to subscribe to Mademoiselle and Vogue because the majority of the APA press is too juvenile in content. “Most APA magazines I have seen cover car shows where many Asian youths go to show off their cars, where there are always teenage girls dressed in revealing clothing. They use a lot of slang and it aims a lot at popular culture,” said Lau.

Some readers complained that they feel isolated by most of the mainstream APA print media. David Cho, who launched his own 80-page Slow Jams comic book in Los Angeles last year, said that “A. Magazine and Yolk mean nothing to me. It seems that the people that they cater to are people who are Asian and want to be white… In the past, A. Magazine never used to have full Asian people on the cover… they used the most white looking Asian model they could find,” said Cho.

Chang agreed, saying that editors are trying to appeal to the hormones more than the minds of Asian Americans. “There will be a picture of Ming-Na Wen holding a Hello Kitty doll on the cover. It’s just too cute to me,” Chang said. Dan Wu, editor of Oriental Whatever, a magazine sold in the Bay Area and overseas, wrote that A. and Yolk—the two main APA magazines—give a false impression of Asian America. Wu also questioned how AsianWeek could claim to be the “Voice of Asian America”.

Too Much Focus on Pop Culture?

D. K. Song, co-editor-in-chief of Hardboiled, a non- profit Asian Pacific American student publication at UC Berkeley, grumbled that in focusing too much on pop culture, the APA mainstream press appears too neutral. “It seems to me most APA media tends to eschew any political agenda and embrace a lukewarm neutrality since they are afraid of alienating readers and possibly affecting their profit margin,” Song said.

But from an editorial standpoint, leaving pop culture behind is very tricky. Jeff Yang, founder and CEO of A. Magazine said that he needs to be able to reach the casual API audience because “there are 150,000 people out there who pick it up because they recognize Russell Wong on the cover. It is frustrating for us because we consider ourselves as a publication that is more than just style and glitter and we appreciate that there is a segment market that embraces harder, edgier and more substantial issues, ” Yang said.

“But when we have had covers of political figures, sales dramatically dropped. This is one of the reasons we are aggressively embracing content on the Internet. We are creating an APA daily online news service that allows us not be held as hostage to the whims of newsstand readers, ” Yang said.

At the end of the day, it’s all about staying in business. Len Fong, director of Cross Cultural Marketing e21 Corp., a multi-cultural marketing agency, agreed that much of API journalism is “soft.” But he added that the lack of political bite in API publications is “an issue of the publication’s economics and survivability. Advertisers are the lifeline to a lot of those publications and would certainly shy away from a publication that is overly political in nature.” Fong also said that many publications hold back for fear of going out of business.