Home Page

 

 

 

 

 

ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES

 

June 16, 2005

Yawu Miller

While New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the city’s official welcome to a national gathering of members of the ethnic press last Thursday in Manhattan, it was the greeting of Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carríon Jr. the evening before that set the stage for the event.

“It’s kind of ironic that we’re here at the New York Times having this discussion at the so-called paper of record,” he told the audience of smartly dressed publishers, advertising executives and reporters gathered for the annual meeting of the New California Media.

“From a Latino perspective and the Bronx perspective, we have a certain opinion of how the New York Times should cover our community.”

Carríon’s allusion to longstanding tensions between that city’s communities of color and it’s pre-eminent daily reflected the sentiments of people of color in many major U.S. cities.

As pollster Sergio Bendixon pointed out in his latest poll for New California Media, ethnic media reaches 51 million Americans — one in four U.S. adults — and 45 percent of those consumers prefer ethnic media to the mainstream.

Despite the growing influence of ethnic media in the United States, advertisers are not yet taking note, according to NCM founder and Executive Director Sandy Close. Close says less than 2 percent of the $145 billion spent on advertising in the United States goes to ethnic media.

“Advertising has to expand its investment if these media are to thrive,” she commented.

Close is looking to increase the ethnic newsmedia’s cut of the advertising dollars by raising the profile of the ethnic press.

“We want to bring the message of ethnic media’s central role in communications to a national audience,” she told the Banner. “To do that, we had to come to Broadway.”

NCM literally did just that, holding its first annual meeting outside of California in Columbia University’s Alfred Lerner Hall on Broadway.

“It’s an important part of bringing this message to a national audience,” she said.

New California Media was founded in 1996 to facilitate cooperation between ethnic media outlets in California and has grown to include over 700 ethnic media outlets across the country.

Filling the auditoriums and meeting rooms at last week’s conference were more than 1,260 print, web and broadcast newsmedia professionals representing many of the outlets belonging to NCM. Also present were members of New York’s Independent Press Association — also founded in 1996 — which serves as an umbrella organization for independent New York media.

Representatives of the Ethnic Media Project, a fledgling initiative modeled after NCM and housed at UMass Boston’s Center on Media and Society, were also present at the event.

In addition to its efforts to raise the profile of ethnic media, NCM works with its affiliates to foster greater communication and resource sharing. Newspapers share editorial content and the organization publishes an online digest of stories from its affiliates.

The organization also conducts polls on issues ranging from ballot initiatives to the war in Iraq. The polls often highlight differences in public opinion between people of color and whites.

Close says the ethnic newsmedia in California serve as an important counterpoint to the mainstream newsmedia, citing their coverage of former Governor Pete Wilson, who aggressively pushed an anti-immigrant agenda before his electoral defeat in 2000.

“They made it impossible for candidates to speak the Pete Wilson line again,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for the black media, the Million Man March would have crashed. The mainstream media ignored it until a week before.

“If it hadn’t been for the Asian media, Wen Ho Lee would have been railroaded. If it hadn’t been for Arab media, nobody would have known that Arab men were being detained. These are real issues.”

In addition to representatives from ethnic media outlets, the convention drew marketing professionals from major corporations including Bank of America and Sony Entertainment.

Television and documentary producer Callie Crossley, a Cambridge resident, said the presence of advertisers indicates that the corporate world may be waking up to the importance of ethnic media.

“There are corporate folks who are far along in the process of understanding that it’s good business and bottom line business,” she told the Banner. “But there are a lot of people who are not at the table yet.”

Back to Lead Story Archives

Home Page