What is the “unfair advantage” of ethnic media? Looking at it from a lean canvas.
One reason I chose to study at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY is its initiative called the Center for Community and Ethnic Media, or CCEM. The other reason is that it offers entrepreneurial journalism, which can equip me with new tools useful for new ventures.When I first visited the school in May 2018, it was running an online platform called “VOICES OF NY” which translated articles from ethnic media into English so that they will be available to the English-speaking society. I was fascinated by the idea of bridging the minority and the majority. Now CCEM is putting more emphasis on equipping ethnic media with digital tools and updated knowledge to sustain the media business.
Ethnic communities and ethnic media in Japan
I have worked in a few ethnic communities in Japan, first as an anthropology student. I did anthropological field research in a Koreatown in Osaka in 2005–2006. I was living in a room in a former temple that used to be run by a Korean monk, who at that time was already 90 and could not hear well. As his daughter, who came from Korea to take care of him, told me in Korean and Japanese, he first came to Japan before World War Ⅱ, returned back to Korea once after the war, but came to Japan again to establish the temple. My room was literally a former worship hall. I was a bit awed to sleep there but eventually got used to it. I would eat a Korean breakfast, usually kimchi, rice, fish and seaweed soup offered by the daughter, and walked to the nearby temple, my main field for study. Every day, I was hearing and reading Korean. I saw many ethnic newspapers in Korean placed in shops and restaurants, some run by first-, second- and third-generation Koreans. The papers run by the first-generation immigrants seemed to focus more on business and immigration status. Those run by Koreans who were born in Japan seemed to focus more on identity and the relationship with Japanese society. My observations are not based on actual data, so excuse me and correct me if you have different ideas.
In 2004, I went to a special exhibition, “Multi-Ethnic Japan,” at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. The museum is the biggest and one of the most important anthropological museums in Japan, and the exhibition was significant in capturing the changing landscape of “mono-cultural” Japan. It included samples from different ethnic media outlets, such as Chinese newspapers or Brazilian radio. At that point there were said to be over 200 ethnic media in Japan.
After I got a job at NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, I did a couple of news reports about how Burmese people in Tokyo lived between the two countries. Japan’s Burmese population (22,000) is much smaller than the Korean population (450,000). It is interesting to compare the two communities. When I got to know the Burmese community, it was already the 2010s. The Burmese were actively communicating across the country borders on social networks. Burmese refugees in Tokyo and the U.S. were directly exchanging information. They were collecting information on SNS, sharing articles from the Burmese or English media in Burma. The only medium I often saw covering the community was Democratic Voice of Burma, established in Oslo, where there was a Burmese refugee community, during the military junta of Myanmar and slowly moved to Yangon, the former capital and biggest city, after democratization. It had only one reporter in Japan, and he was actively sending stories back to Yangon, where the newsroom would publish them on its website and TV programs. When I visited to film the newsroom in Yangon in 2015, it was promoting “citizen power journalism,”asking citizens all over Myanmar to send photos and videos related to crime and social issues. It was doing many collaborative projects with students and engineers inside and outside Myanmar. That is how flexible a medium can be. So, in the case of Burmese media in Japan in the 2010s, there aren’t any “ethnic media” like the ones in New York City. Maybe the population is too small to make an ethnic medium profitable.
An “unfair advantage” that only ethnic media bear
In Community Engagement class at the Newmark School this week, we had two wonderful guests, both experts on ethnic media: Rong Xiaoqing, a reporter at Sing Tao Daily, and Jehangir Khattak, CCEM’s outreach director.
Sing Tao Daily is a newspaper headquartered in Hong Kong, with a network in Canada, the U.K., France and Australia. Rong has been a reporter for over 16 years now, covering everything from breaking news to long-form human interest stories. Jehangir, formerly an editor at a Pakistani newspaper in New York, is now taking a major role at CCEM to find out the needs of ethnic media in New York City and equip them with necessary tools and connections.
Jehangir presented these reasons ethnic media are needed in New York City:-About 30 percent of the people living in New York City are foreign-born.
-About 30 percent of the people living in New York City are foreign-born.
-1.8 million people speak English with limited language skills.
-For the people with limited English-language skills, mainstream media are not the main source of information.
-Jehangir and his team at CCEM have been updating their list of ethnic media, now at least 300 publishers in at least 50 languages. In the case of Bangladeshi media, 10 years ago there were only four, and now there are 17. It sound as if the ethnic media scene is flourishing!
Even so, Rong showed serious concern over the sustainability of ethnic media, especially ethnic media in Chinese, of which she is part. In the last 10 years she has seen a huge shift in how people gather information; the younger generation no longer pays for traditional papers now that it has WeChat 微信! I had heard the same concern from a few ethnic media editors in Japan last year. In fact, lack of online presence and lack of reach to the younger audience are common issues for all the media. Unfortunately, we all have to solve the question of how to deliver the content to customers.
More critical to ethnic media is that they have the roles only they can play I was starting to think of the “unfair advantage” they might have. “Unfair advantage” is the skill you have that is your unique talent and an element you want to recognize when starting a new business, as I learned in Jeremy Caplan’s Startup Sprint class at the Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY a few weeks earlier.
Rong mentioned that she and her colleagues were covering the nail salons in Manhattan a good year before The New York Times did because they had an advantage in language and connection. She also referred to the possibility of fostering conversations among different ethnic communities. In “The shooting of Akai Gurley,” Akai, a 28-year-old African-American man, was fatally shot on Nov. 20, 2014, in Brooklyn by a Chinese-American police officer a. The officer was indicted on criminal charges, and many Chinese-Americans took actions to save the officer by protesting the charge and making donations to his family, saying he had been scapegoated by a white colleague. There was also a counteraction by Chinese-Americans who stood with the #blacklivesmatter movement. The incident continues to rankle and could escalate to mutual hatred. In March 2016, Rong wrote in an article about a gathering organized by the leaders of the Chinese-American and African American communities to talk about the case. Here is the quote from the English version of the article:
“What happens between the two communities cannot be defined only by protests and anger. There is also communication. At a forum entitled “Race Relations and Collaboration between Asian American and African American Communities After the Peter Liang Case,” held on March 28 at the New York City Bar Association, leaders from the two communities said they all need to do better in highlighting the common struggles of both communities. And people in both communities shouldn’t only focus on an individual case, but should explore the issues on which they can work together in the long run.”
The headline in English was “Liang Case Triggers a Conversation Between Two Communities.” She said that media from different ethnic communities can collaborate to cover the communities better, offering one another different viewpoints. Indeed, the elements an ethnic community bears, such as language, culture, human relationships, identity, trust and history are sometimes too complex for mainstream media to learn without enough time or a very good navigator into the community. Ethnic media can claim them as “unfair advantages” they have that many mainstream media don’t.
It may sound optimistic, but to me, ethnic media have so many “unfair advantages” that can attract members of the next generation who are full of curiosity and open-mindedness.
