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The New Corporate Ethnic Media

Communication giants aren’t stupid; they know where demographics are going

Here are some scenes from the ethnic media that struggle to remain the authentic voice of our community: An overworked editor tries to cajole a freelancer, not to get his/her work in on deadline, but to do the story for less than a dime a word. A greenhorn reporter tries to make sense of a complicated story, and gets lost in the details. A salesperson tries to convince another restaurant to pay cash for an ad instead of bartering for meals.

It’s the mom and pop world of our major ethnic media.

And we do it all for love.

Or did.

In the past, practitioners never questioned working in the ethnic media as a labor of love (though often it felt more like the labor of childbirth). But we trudged on because one comes to the realization that we write for the ethnic media because we must.

If we don’t, no one else will.

Mainstream papers do not reflect community interests. Pick up the paper and you see a generic world reported in a generic way that too often excludes us.

On any given day, is the front page a mirror of our society? With mainstream newsroom populations just 11 percent minority, journalism remains what I call “the white ethnic” media.

If you want to read about us, you have to turn to the ethnic media. I call it the “blood media.”

I like the term “blood media.” It sounds cool, as if the process were a life and death proposition. Indeed, it is. The connection runs through the veins. You subscribe at birth. You’re born into the target market. You read it because the ethnic media is about you, like nothing else. Without it, there’s no voice, no presence.

But something is happening to the ethnic media that is about to change it forever.

It’s being discovered.

By white folks.

This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.

The white corporate world brings something that ethnic media has always lacked.

Money. And to a certain degree, professionalism.

The numbers make the ethnic media ripe for the change.

I’ve long talked about the changing demographics and how minorities are becoming the majority in the nation. The prediction is expected to become the reality sometime in the next 20 years.

Already in California, the numbers have changed the landscape dramatically. There are 10.2 million Latinos; 3.9 million Asian Pacific Islanders. Yes, Asians are the No. 2 minority. African Americans are at 2.3 million. There are 300,000 Native Americans.

Add them up and it’s 50.1 percent of the state. And growing. It’s made California “ground zero for the ethnic media.” Not only are people of color becoming the mainstream, we are becoming the target market.

More change is coming. The bottom line dictates it. The most recent estimate I’ve seen shows ethnic purchasing power growing to $1.8 trillion.

With that kind of power, we’ll see a lot more “Wassup”-style in advertising, a confirmation that ethnic culture has become a major part of the pop mainstream. Witness the success of a J Lo and a Crouching Tiger.

There’s a lot of growth to be had. Currently, $4 billion is spent nationwide on ethnic media advertising. But this represents just 2 percent of all ad spending.

As we grow as a market, the spending on ethnic media will grow. But here’s the question: Will any of it trickle down to the real ethnic media? By real ethnic media, I mean the mom-and-pops that continue to struggle despite the numbers that indicate a bullish future.

Maybe some of it will.

But more often than not, what seems to be happening is something similar to a corporate takeover.

Corporate media giants aren’t stupid. They know where the demographics are going. And so far, the strategy is to “go ethnic.”

The Knight Ridder paper in Northern California, The Mercury News, has already started “ethnic versions” that appeal to the area’s large Vietnamese American and Latino communities. Both the Viet Merc and El Mundo are good-looking publications. But they are mere shadow versions of the corporate soul that birthed them.

The professionalism and standards are there. And you can get your Mercury stories in- language if you have trouble in English. But there’s something wrong. They may write and report about the community, but the community seems missing in the translation.

When corporate giants aren’t starting their own ethnic shadows, they’re buying shares in successful papers. In Los Angeles, the Times is part owner of the largest and most influential Latino paper in the area, La Opinion.

These are the two models that have emerged from the market place. You start your own ethnic identity. Or you buy in. It’s forcing traditional media to acknowledge us. But in doing so, they’ve replaced the most unique trait of the ethnic media. It’s no longer about blood. It’s about money.

I’d prefer that corporate media change their main platforms, hire more ethnic reporters and cover all communities in a fair and balanced way. The Mercury, to its credit, has done that. But they’ve taken the extra step by wanting to become the ethnic media, too.

So who gets the lion’s share of the ad dollars? Most likely, not the mom-and-pops — the struggling voices of the community who deserve it.

As the ethnic media undergo this change, I find myself becoming oddly sentimental for the “funkiness” of the independent voice of the community. Authentic voices are at stake. But most will see this change — the ethnic media as profit center — as maturation, or evolution.

All I know is, when corporate profits course through the veins, it’s a totally different ballgame.

It used to be about blood. We did it for love. Now, we do it for money.