Growing Niche in California Media Offers Ethnic Groups News, Advertising

By Minerva Canto

The Orange County Register 

November 6, 2002

Mike Kai was a sophomore in high school when he launched a Web page to vent his frustration over a steady diet of media images depicting Asians as storekeepers and other stereotypical roles. 

"I wanted to find and interview other Asian people with varied interests. It was like an outlet to show that our interests are so wide-ranging and they don't conform to just ethnicity," said Kai, a student at Corona del Mar High when he created Asianconnections.com. 

Four years later, the hobby that began in a teenager's bedroom is a Newport Beach business run by his mother and others including a former Rolling Stone editor, with 19-year-old Kai occasionally pitching in when he can break away from his studies at Yale. Considered a prime source for information about everything Asian, its success story is but one of many among the hundreds of ethnic media businesses riding the wave of demographic change in California today. 

Traditionally, ethnic media have served immigrants primarily, especially newcomers hungry for news about their native countries and tips for adjusting in the United States. But they are increasingly drawing in second- and third- generation immigrants looking for cultural material not easily found in traditional media. 

Orange County alone has more than 50 ethnic media outlets, including 30 Vietnamese-language publications, more than two dozen Spanish-language outlets and others serving populations such as Pakistanis and Turks. 

Among these: al borde, a free biweekly publication for Orange County and Los Angeles residents, features Cuban hip-hop, Argentinean rock and other alternative Spanish-language music. 

Direct-From-Home Network in Laguna Hills offers satellite TV channels to Turkish-speaking households all over North America, with news, film and live soccer games, as well as two radio channels. 

The Santa Ana-based Metro Monthly magazine targets the Iranian population with news from all over the world, but especially their native country. Sherri Jafari and her husband founded the magazine 10 years ago, gradually expanding its circulation from 2,000 to 7,000 subscribers. 

"It gives me a good feeling to be a part of the community and to be able to pass on information that they need," Jafari said. 

The Jafaris also publish the Iranian Yellow Pages in Irvine, in addition to having sister publications in San Jose. Like most ethnic media, Metro Monthly relies heavily on small businesses within the community for its advertising dollars, which can make or break a media company. The publication, which contains a handful of pages in English, attracts ads from Iranian doctors, lawyers and accountants. 

Ethnic media is slowly drawing in more big-name advertisers such as Sears and Procter &Gamble, but advocates believe there is much untapped advertising potential. 

San Francisco-based New California Media, an alliance that represents more than 400 print, broadcast and online outlets, was founded six years ago to corral the power of California's ethnic media. At its third annual conference in Los Angeles several weeks ago, journalists gathered to network, learn business tips and pay homage to the best among them in what have been dubbed the "Pulitzers of ethnic media," which included a "Best New Publication" award for the Westminster weekly Viet Tide. 

New California Media offers advertisers the option of a "one- order/one-bill placement service" that gives them access to a group of ethnic media companies, saving the hassle of having to deal with each one individually. 

Len Fong, strategic planning consultant to New California Media, said many advertisers have been savvy enough to take advantage of the reach of ethnic media. 

"They'll get bigger bang for their buck. So they'll get less expensive advertising in a marketplace they can't get anywhere else," Fong said. "Ethnic media audiences are very loyal because other media don't speak to them in a voice that matters. The ethnic media that we represent are very well tied to their communities." 

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the largest utility company in California, is one advertiser that has gotten results.

"Mainstream media is no longer the way to communicate with all our customers," said Claudia Mendoza, ethnic media specialist for Pacific Gas and Electric, serving 5.6 million customers from Bakersfield to Oregon. 

Mendoza's job requires maintaining contact with such diverse outlets as a Chinese-language TV station, a Russian-language cable station, and a station targeting the Hmong group from Vietnam. Outreach to ethnic communities has resulted in increased awareness about energy conservation, with customers clamoring for compact fluorescent bulbs and rebates for new energy-efficient appliances, Mendoza said. 

The company overcomes language challenges by offering incentives and training to those among their 19,000 employees with foreign-language skills who want to volunteer as "honor spokespeople" for the company and do on-air interviews for radio or television. 

There are other challenges, too. 

Due to inexperience, many ethnic media businesses do not know how to market themselves adequately, sometimes failing to document their advertising successes. 

"You've got to show advertisers what makes you special," Terrie-Dawn Clark, director of sales for Verified Audit Circulation, told journalists at the New California Media conference. 

One sector that is not having too much trouble these days attracting advertisers is the Spanish-language press, a fiercely competitive market in Orange County, where Latin American natives form the bulk of the immigrant population. 

Angel Orea, publisher of the Santa Ana-based Contacto weekly newspaper, which features columns by state Sen. Joe Dunn, said his business is doing so well that he plans to start publishing twice a week soon, with one edition devoted mainly to sports. That product will compete with Deportes en Accion (Sports in Action), a Spanish-language monthly launched within the past year. 

"I think I'm doing pretty well considering we've only been around one year and 10 months," said Orea, who also owns a sports supply shop. 

The rapid proliferation of ethnic media outlets is happening at a time when mainstream media are struggling to capture the same audiences targeted by these smaller businesses. 

The Orange County Register, which recently celebrated the 10-year anniversary of its Spanish-language publication Excelsior, launched the Spanish-language Web site OCVive.com last spring as part of its campaign to target Latino readers. About the same time, a group of young activists launched www.oclatino.net, with the slogan "so much more than picking oranges." 

Ken Brusic, head of content for Freedom Orange County Information, which includes The Register and other sister media, said he thinks mainstream newspapers like The Register and ethnic media have similar goals of "knitting the community together" by providing the necessary information people need and want. 

"There is a business concern, too, in that if we don't figure out a way to be able to sell newspapers and magazines and Angels books to people other than English-speakers, eventually our business will diminish," Brusic said. 

Michael Kai and his mother, Suzanne Kai, a former journalist, believe the key to their success, especially in light of the dot-com crash, has been staying true to their editorial mission and to running their business frugally. 

"We've got one foot in the mainstream and another foot in our ethnic communities. We sort of serve as a bridge," said Suzanne Kai. "I don't know of many others out there who do what we do. I just really feel we fill a void out there."