- Email: [email protected]
The Future of Ethnic Newspapers in the United States and Canada
Serials Review 38 (2012) 105–109
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Serials Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/serrev
The Balance Point
The Future of Ethnic Newspapers in the United States and Canada Faye Leibowitz, Column Editor University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Available online 21 May 2012
a b s t r a c t In interviews with the editor, James Danky reflects on the role and future of the ethnic press in the United States, and Thomas Saras comments on the importance and future of the ethnic press in contemporary Canadian society. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction My first professional position after obtaining the M.L.S. degree was as a newspaper cataloger with the Pennsylvania Newspaper Project, a component of the U.S. Newspaper Program. The United States Newspaper Program (USNP) was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities with technical assistance from the Library of Congress. The goal of the USNP was to be “a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present” (United States Newspaper Program). My favorite aspect of this job was cataloging ethnic newspapers. I majored in Russian in college, and studied many other languages, so this was my opportunity to put my linguistic skills to good use. Pennsylvania has a rich ethnic history. Many of the early settlers were Germans, who founded newspapers when they moved to their new homes in North America during the eighteenth century. I cataloged many of these newspapers. The occupational hazard associated with my job was that the newspapers were very interesting to read, so I had to resist the temptation to spend too much time reading them. One of the interesting (but sad) phenomena that I noticed as I cataloged ethnic publications was that as time passed, and the first-generation immigrant communities died out, fewer and fewer of the newspapers were published in languages other than English. With assimilation came suppression of the mother tongue. Perhaps this is a reflection of immigrant life in America—the younger generations lose ties with original homelands, come under the influence of American media culture, and therefore completely assimilate into American life. This assimilation has both good and bad aspects, but its effect on multilingualism in the United States is profound. Ethnic newspapers, like other newspapers, exist in a changing media environment. The future environment is predicted in the videos EPIC 2014 and EPIC 2015 created by Robin Sloan, Matt Thomson, with music by Aaron McLeran, in which all news becomes crowd sourced
E-mail address: [email protected]. 0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2012.04.009
trivia and the New York Times is pushed into print-only irrelevance by a vast electronic news network called the Evolving Personalized Information Construct or EPIC (Sloan & Thomson, 2012). I hope that ethnic newspapers will not succumb to the EPIC future. Because I was curious to learn from experts about the future of the ethnic press, I contacted James Danky for an American perspective and Thomas Saras for a Canadian perspective. James Danky worked with the United States Newspaper Program for which he devised a list of “intended audience” terms representing the various ethnic, political and other groups of American newspaper readers to facilitate access to these publications (Danky, 1986). He has served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 1990 where he taught “Mass Media and Minorities” for a decade. Danky was the Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society for thirty-five years until his retirement in 2007. In 1987 he was awarded the Bowker Ulrich's Serials Librarianship Award and in 2002 the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award, both from the American Library Association. He is the author of three dozen books including African-American Newspapers and Periodicals (Harvard, 1998) and Native American Periodicals and Newspapers (Greenwood, 1984). In 1992 Danky co-founded the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (now Print and Digital Culture) and directed its work until 2006. In addition to editing a number of volumes for the Center including Print Culture in a Diverse America (Illinois, 1998; winner of the Carry McWilliams Award), Danky's “Reading, Writing, and Resisting: African American Print Culture” appeared in A History of the Book in America 1880–1940, volume 4 (North Carolina, 2009). James generously agreed to an interview to share his ideas about the future of the ethnic press in America as well as his thoughts about library service relating to ethnic publications. Thomas Saras is the president, chief executive officer and chair of the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada (NEPMCC). The NEPMCC is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote and integrate economic, social and culture interests of ethnic communities into the mainstream of Canadian society. A major part of its mission is “To gather and disseminate information which will lead to a better understanding and cooperation among the various
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F. Leibowitz / Serials Review 38 (2012) 105–109
ethnic groups in Canada and the mainstream society” (see http:// nepmcc.ca/). In addition to responsibilities with NEPMCC, Saras serves as the editor-in-chief of the Greek language monthly publication Patrides, which is centered in Toronto and distributed across Canada and the United States (see http://www.patrides.com/). Saras kindly agreed to respond to my questions relating to the Canadian ethnic publications environment. 2. Interview with James Danky Faye Leibowitz (FL): How did you become interested in the ethnic press? James Danky (JD): I think that I became interested in the ethnic press by virtue of growing up in Los Angeles, which is a huge, multi-ethnic community, now more so than it was in the 1950s or 1960s. Certainly, it was incredibly rich. I would say that I've never been to a more multicultural school than my elementary school, Hoover Street, which is in the Korea Town/Pico Union neighborhood, for those who know Los Angeles. You could view people of Mexican descent reading La Opinión, people from China reading Chinese language newspapers, all of which were produced in Los Angeles. So I was aware of it then. It really was heightened in the 1960s with the invention of the alternative press, titles like the Los Angeles Free Press and many, many others across the country, that de-center, deemphasize, to be gentle and charitable, the role of the mainstream media. These publications began to produce stories and perspectives that you wouldn't find, in my case, in the Los Angeles Times, or nationally, in the New York Times. It showed that there was a variety of media out there. Then, I would suppose that lastly, in my library job at the Wisconsin Historical Society, I was immediately thrust into a collection that had a large volume of ethnic press from the U.S. and Canada. That wealth of titles meant that I had to figure out which new ones should be added and what should be emphasized and the like. That gave me entrée into a national conversation with librarians and scholars about the ethic press from the early seventies on. FL: How do ethnic periodicals serve as the memory of a culture? JD: I think that the ethnic press does provide the memory of a culture. That's the function of a kind of question that librarians see all the time: a student has to write some kind of paper that looks into the history of a particular community, group, or person and frequently the answer to the question will be found in the ethnic press rather than in the mainstream press, for some reasons that we'll discuss later. These publications are the ones that are more likely to care about a particular community. If that's overstating it, you can at least think of them as being concerned with the fine grain of events in a particular community. They draw distinctions that are invisible for lots of different reasons in the mainstream media because they have the sources. They also know their consumers—their audience cares deeply about distinctions that are masked for cultural reasons in the majority population. For example, when the majority population sees, if they see at all, the Latino communities, they would think of Catholicism, but they wouldn't necessarily understand the amazing, rapid rise of Evangelical movements within Latin communities in America. And yes, ethnic periodicals do provide this memory, because that is who they are, and that's who their audience is. They have to have and do have that cultural resonance. They can note the important festivals of the year. We just had Dia de los Muertos, which is a major event in the Mexican diaspora, and that's one that would very infrequently make its way into the mainstream media. FL: Can the ethnic press serve as a motivator for economic and social change in a community? JD: Absolutely! The ethnic media are going to be able to advocate, in an open and enthusiastic fashion, for economic opportunities in minority communities in a way that you are less likely to find in the mainstream press. These publications know their communities— they know their specific needs. You could take a national issue at
the moment, such as high unemployment—we know that if you look at the ways that unemployment is deeply stratified by ethnicity in America with very, very disparate rates between African American communities and white communities and with Latino communities in between, they understand the problem and thus can advocate very particular kinds of solutions that you wouldn't find in a mainstream newspaper. In a study I've done informally several times in my classes, you have the students read a week's worth of the business section in the mainstream daily papers to try to find minority stories and references, and very frequently, they come up with zero. The business world being described in the business pages is a world of homogenized, primarily white society, which misses all of the small businesses that your eyes and all your other senses tell you are there when you simply drive through ethnic neighborhoods in any American city that I'm familiar with. In terms of social change, some issues are found in the mainstream media – take your pick – the Rodney King acquittal riot, obviously a national if not an international media issue. But there are thousands and thousands of other kinds of issues that only have a chance to have their voices heard through the ethnic media—they don't show up in mainstream media in newspapers. This is the same way that in small towns you'll have a police report, but in major American cities it just wouldn't be possible because there is too much crime. That focus again is on the fine grain that you'll find in the ethnic press that you don't find elsewhere. The role of religious figures in the ethnic press is a notable distinction between them. I think you'd surely find that the religious persona of African American pastors intermingled deeply with looking at social justice. I don't mean just a national figure such as Jesse Jackson, but you find it in all communities. FL: Do different ethnic communities use ethnic periodicals in different ways and for different purposes? JD: Different ethnic communities certainly use their ethnic media in very different ways. For example, older immigrant communities such as a very long-standing white ethnic community like the Irish have different kinds of needs because they are assimilated by race and economic status to a very different degree, even though there has been continuing immigration from places like Ireland, now more so than a few years ago. It's an older integrated community. But in communities where there is a strong, contemporary immigration, it is very different. They need to provide informational services that help empower those communities and a lot of it is trying to deal with the incoming arrivals who will, in general, have much less English at their disposal and have a wealth of issues. You see this when you look at the advertising pages. For example, you'll see advertisements for immigration lawyers, something that you don't see in the mainstream media. It's not that there aren't immigration lawyers that would serve a white majority population. That's not a service that is offered as often. I think that a lot has to do with the phenomenon of how long a group, at least the majority of that group, has been in America, and the longer that they've been here, the less likely they are to be deeply engaged in events in the culture of origin. It doesn't mean that they are disinterested in them, just that interest may only flower on ceremonial occasions. The best example would be to look at British Americans, in the sense that they've been here a long time, or Scots Americans, to look at a subset. I'm hard pressed to think of someone who is a Scots American, at least by surname, who is either familiar with or passionate about events in Scotland. FL: I'll bet that a lot of those people have lost their ethnic identities. JD: Sure. Within many individuals, they have the ability to choose which ethnicity they want to be or to emphasize. I have a good friend whose father was German and whose mother was Irish, but she never mentions her German roots—she's only interested in emphasizing her Irish roots. Where race is not an inhibitor to that, people can and do make those choices. This comes through most profoundly in the last two federal censuses, where people were allowed to check
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more than one ethnicity, and there were radical rises in the number of people who were part Native American. Now this is self-reported, but the idea is that a white majority, but not exclusively white (African Americans can do it, too) will go in and choose Native American ancestors. There are vast numbers of Americans amongst the 300,000,000 of us where we have that option. FL: What are the positive and negative aspects of assimilating an ethnic community into the larger culture? What role does the ethnic press play in this process? JD: It's beyond a question of positive and negative. The process of assimilation, I think, can be best understood in terms of the “costs” that are assigned by the majority society. The whole process of acculturation and education that leads towards citizenship in this country has been in place formally since the 1920s with many other changes. The demands of learning English, of negotiating the demands of American society, particularly industrial society, extracted a particular kind of cost from immigrant communities. That is, they had to adapt in a lot of ways if they were to prosper in the ways that they hoped they would in this country. Perhaps the clearest marker for us who stand outside of those communities is language retention. The majority of Americans are monolingual people, except when you get to immigrant communities. The role of language or the ability to speak a particular language really plummets over the generations. And that's not just an American phenomenon but is true globally where you see every so often an article on the crisis of disappearing languages, how many are being lost each day, how there's only one speaker left. New York City is a good example of that—a recent article indicated that there were 800 different languages spoken in New York City, which is really quite daunting! I was always more impressed with the smaller reported number of 150–200 languages spoken by kids in the school districts in Los Angeles and New York. Eight hundred is really a gigantic number, but some of these languages are spoken by relatively few people. There are Mayan dialects, a particular example that comes to mind. But most of all, the giant phenomenon is that you get some kind of homogenization of language skills where it becomes less after one generation and drops again dramatically, etc. There will always be somebody whose parents force him to learn a particular language, but it's vastly more common to find a situation where only the grandparents speak the language, and the grandkids don't. So what is it that survives that sort of assimilation process? Well, the wearing of ethnic costumes, the making of ethnic foods. If you live in the small town that I live in, Stoughton, Wisconsin, which is a Norwegian American community, we put up American flags on Main Street, we celebrate Syttende Mai, but the high school hasn't offered Norwegian in years. So it gets down to a caricature of itself—people wear Norwegian costumes for one day a year and eat lutefisk, krumkake and sort of leave it at that. But it's not dynamic and there are lots of reasons for that which I referenced earlier, because there are relatively few Norwegians who emigrate to the U.S., and if they do, they're not coming to Stoughton, Wisconsin or other small towns—they go to New York City. FL: That is probably why they have so many languages there, because they have so many recent immigrants. JD: They have international immigrants who will come and live for a while and go back to their home countries, too. But I think that the story of immigration too little reflects the historically massive return of immigrants – people who come here, whether from Mexico or further south, or whether they came from Europe in the nineteenth century – huge numbers of people returned. They did not stay here. I know that from my wife's family, her grandfather came here from Germany in the twenties, but his brother was here for a brief period and then just went back. For all kinds of reasons – cultural, ethnic, economic – but I think that the general mythology is that the poor and tired arrived at Ellis Island and everybody stayed, and that's just not true. And I think that reflects the dynamism of ethnic
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communities—for many years, in many different communities, there's a great transportation loop between those places. We certainly read about that with regard to Mexico and Central America today— migrants coming and going back. I mean, more migrants have returned to Mexico and Central America because of the global economic collapse in the U.S. than I'm sure the fences kept out. That's an unsupported statement, but I'll bet it's true! FL: In the ethnic press, too, over the generations, I've noticed that you find less and less original language. The publication might still exist, but, over time, in the United States, anyway, it becomes more English than Italian or German or whatever language. JD: An interesting case study would be the Polish press in America, where after the rise of Solidarity, twenty five—plus, thirty years ago, suddenly there was a boom of migrants from Poland. But prior to that, the number of Polish speakers and readers had been declining precipitously, just as it does for any group. But then they got kind of a bump there, and that revived some of it. But today in America I'm sure that there are a relatively small number of Polish language newspapers. And likewise for any of the European groups, because they're here and need to learn English to function in a lot of aspects of American society. Not to say that there aren't people in immigrant communities who can get by just fine and not know the English language, but you don't find that true when their kids go to school. Their kids become, by circumstance, bilingual. They don't speak Vietnamese at school, but they speak Vietnamese at home. In earlier generations, my wife's family spoke German at home but went to school in English. And the press works exactly with that. The press is not a philanthropy—it provides a public service, a very important one, but the ethnic press needs to adapt to the need and demands of its community. If its community has a decline in the number of people speaking and reading the home language, they have to adjust beyond that. And you'll sometimes find this halfway state where you'll find papers that are bilingual. Sometimes it's translated; sometimes they'll only run an article on baseball in English, and they might run another one bilingual, in English and the home language, on soccer. FL: Do you feel that the future is brighter for those ethnic publications that are commercial, or for those that are non-profit? I guess that I'm interested in the economic aspects of the ethnic press. JD: Well, I think that there's only a future for the ethnic press if it can continue to attract readers and sell ads. And I guess that what I would do is to put a slight spin on the question—what has suffered tremendously, and this is true of the ethnic press as well as the largest of the mainstream press, are the business models. The intellectual and service models of newspapers are still valid, even if they reach a smaller number of people. We'll talk about that in a minute. But you can't, in my opinion, produce a newspaper to sell for a dollar or other nominal sum in a community where there are also people producing similar publications based on a free distribution model. The action has really totally switched to free distribution of newspapers. You'll find many that you have to pay for, but those are going to tend to be older, more specialized, and essentially not a general newspaper, even for that ethnic community. They will have paid subscriptions because there are people who choose to read them and no longer live in that geographical area. A wide array of newspapers (and librarians are particularly oblivious to them, here I'm thinking of in a public library more than in an academic library) are available on free distribution racks when you walk into the library. While I haven't walked into the Pittsburgh public library to see those racks, I can guess what publications I would likely find there. I might find Latino and African American weeklies, perhaps some Asian ones— it's hard to say. Whereas I would be less likely to find older, white immigrant publications from Polish or Croatian communities and so forth. But it's the business model that's been undercut there. If you're selling a Croatian weekly and you need to charge people for it, because the ads alone don't support it, that's going to be a more
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limited economic model than a publisher who is producing a Latino publication in Pittsburgh where they are going to support themselves through the sales of advertising. There are some that are non-profit, but the ethnic press, as is the mainstream press, is a commercial enterprise and will continue to evolve, prosper and fail as it meets commercial goals, as it produces the articles that attract readers and thus advertisers. For the mainstream press you've seen the rise of non-profit news organizations in some cities to take up slack or provide investigative reporting for things the mainstream newspapers used to do when they had larger staffs. For the ethnic press, I think that the future is in being diligent and creative in the commercial models that they are using. FL: What impact will emerging technologies have on the ethnic press? JD: Most ethnic newspapers, certainly the ones that serve more contemporary immigrant communities, all of them seem to have a Web presence, which can range from the full text of the publication to selected aspects of it. Increasingly, this is valuable for classified ads in the particular community, where they are going to duplicate some of the craigslist kind of success for a particular community. The barriers to entry are very low by comparison with the amount of money needed to print a newspaper, but the ethnic press needs to do both things simultaneously. Though they need to have a vigorous Web presence, because of the great digital divide by class in America, they will also need to have a paper presence out there for the foreseeable future. They need to be dynamic on both sides of that equation. FL: What are the best strategies for building ethnic press collections in libraries? JD: Well, I think that it comes down to two different suggestions, depending on if you're a public library or an academic library. They have very different audiences. For the public libraries, and this sounds so simplistic, if they would only pick up one each of everything that is distributed outside the security gates, and make sure that it is added to the collection, they would already be ahead of many existing public libraries. I've done field work for more than a decade on my AfricanAmerican Newspapers and Periodicals Bibliography. It was always astounding to me that you could visit public libraries, and titles that were available outside the security gate were not available in the libraries' collections themselves. What could be easier collection development than doing that? And frequently, these free distribution papers that cover an ethnic community are less likely to offer subscriptions. They are not set up for that. I've encountered enumerable ones that did not have a bulk mailing permit because everything was distributed in stacks in retail stores or public libraries. But it's exactly those kinds of publications that have the really micro approach to a particular community. In very large cities like Chicago I've observed many times that you can find papers, such as the ones serving the vast African American South Side, that are available in some neighborhoods but not in others. Essentially, these publications zone themselves—they are dominant in one area, but you are less likely to find them in a different area to the west. If librarians in the branch libraries could pick up those local publications and add them to their collections (public libraries are very “presentist,” and that's a good thing), they can potentially have historical materials. A branch library will then have the opportunity to gather up those older materials that are in less demand in the branch, and to give those older materials to the central headquarters branch, where perhaps they will be eventually available for digitization and preservation. For academic libraries, where we continue to experience the gigantic changes that digitization has brought, it seems increasingly true that students are unlikely to read much of anything that is not digitized. That's been my experience. And there are a variety of electronic products out there (the largest of them is Ethnic Newswatch from ProQuest) that provide the students with the breadth of perspectives on contemporary topics. For those doing historical research, there
have been a number of digitization products that have been sold to academic libraries that give them a wealth of materials in ways that are unprecedented, and essentially allow institutions to have the kind of volume of material that, with few exceptions, they would never have otherwise been likely to acquire in the preceding 150 years of libraries. To use a model that I have used in the past is to think globally, yes, but to collect locally. FL: Do you have any suggestions relating to best practices in public services relating to ethnic publications? What are the best ways to serve a community in terms of ethnic publications? JD: The best way to serve a community is, of course, to collect their publications. That is, to have the public service staff reminds their patrons that there is more than just the daily English language newspaper and Web sources. But the thing that every single day people in public services remind their patrons of, lay or academic, is that not everything is on the Web. Even though more than anyone could ever read is there, it doesn't mean that everything is there. And particularly in the case of ethnic publications, which are less likely to be ubiquitous than mainstream, English language materials, it's important for libraries to collect these materials, to have them available, so that they can feel connected to this particular kind of community. In a public library branch, if you serve a significant Latino or new Asian population, both groups have historically been hard to serve. There's a resonance between the information desires of the community and what the library collects. Don't just send them to the New York Times, as valuable as it is, but remember that there are lots and lots of other sources out there that will in many cases be far preferable in terms of providing the information that the patron wants. 3. Interview with Thomas Saras FL: How did you become interested in the ethnic press? TS: I am the editor-in-chief of Patrides, a publication with 160,000 copies per issue. Patrides circulates all over Canada and the States. We have been publishing for forty-one years. My personal experience in the area of ethnic publishing has made me aware of the need for organizing this sector. Recent uprisings of ethnic communities in England, France, Germany and other countries have confirmed to me the need for a strong organization of the ethnic press. FL: How do ethnic periodicals serve as the “memory” of a culture? TS: Every publication carries its stories in the language of the community, and some of them also in English or French. Language is one of the main elements of culture. Therefore, ethnic publications support the survival of the culture as well as supporting the memory of the heritage of the community. FL: Can the ethnic press serve as a motivator for economic and social change in a community? TS: If you review the constitution of NEPMCC, you will see that motivation of economic and social changes in the community is featured prominently in our objectives. FL: Do different ethnic communities use ethnic periodicals in different ways and for different purposes? TS: No. Most of our members are professional journalists. They love the job and they consider their publications to be a “labor of love.” The main objectives are to inform the community about the Canadian political and social realities and to inform the government of Canada about the ethnic communities and the problems that each one is facing. FL: What are the positive and negative aspects of assimilating an ethnic community into the larger culture? What role does the ethnic press play in this process? TS: Assimilating is a bad word. Integration is the right one. The ethnic press specifically helps communities to integrate into mainstream Canadian society. Assimilation is the American concept that relates to the “melting pot.” Here in Canada we are free to retain our cultural identity and yet to be good Canadians. The work of the ethnic press and media is to inform the citizen, in his own language,
F. Leibowitz / Serials Review 38 (2012) 105–109
about events happening around him. Informing the members of the community about the affairs of the state helps them to understand the country and the political system, therefore making them good citizens prepared for their duties. In Canada, as in every other democracy, all citizens must be well informed. FL: Is the future brighter for commercial ethnic publications or for those that are non-profit? TS: Ethnic publications have their own very limited markets within their communities. It is rare that another community wants to advertise in a publication outside of the community, but it happens. At this point and for as long as new immigrants arrive in Canada to join these communities, ethnic publications will thrive. Every ethnic publication distributes a great number of copies for free in various community outlets. A smaller number is distributed through Canada Post by subscription and some others are sold at commercial outlets.
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FL: What impact will emerging technologies have on the ethnic press? TS: The publishers of ethnic press publications are adjusting faster than the mainstream media to emerging technologies. This is due to the fact that they are mostly family-owned companies in which the decision-making process is much faster than in big corporations. The Canadian government also helps in this effort by providing so called “innovation funds” to mainstream magazines as well as ethnic publishers. References Danky, J. P. (1986). Newspapers and their readers: The United States newspaper program's list of intended audience terms. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 6, 85–106. Sloan, R. & Thomson, M. (2012). EPIC 2014 and EPIC 2015. Retrieved from http://www. robinsloan.com/epic/ and http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Serials Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/serrev
The Balance Point
The Future of Ethnic Newspapers in the United States and Canada Faye Leibowitz, Column Editor University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Available online 21 May 2012
a b s t r a c t In interviews with the editor, James Danky reflects on the role and future of the ethnic press in the United States, and Thomas Saras comments on the importance and future of the ethnic press in contemporary Canadian society. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction My first professional position after obtaining the M.L.S. degree was as a newspaper cataloger with the Pennsylvania Newspaper Project, a component of the U.S. Newspaper Program. The United States Newspaper Program (USNP) was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities with technical assistance from the Library of Congress. The goal of the USNP was to be “a cooperative national effort among the states and the federal government to locate, catalog, and preserve on microfilm newspapers published in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present” (United States Newspaper Program). My favorite aspect of this job was cataloging ethnic newspapers. I majored in Russian in college, and studied many other languages, so this was my opportunity to put my linguistic skills to good use. Pennsylvania has a rich ethnic history. Many of the early settlers were Germans, who founded newspapers when they moved to their new homes in North America during the eighteenth century. I cataloged many of these newspapers. The occupational hazard associated with my job was that the newspapers were very interesting to read, so I had to resist the temptation to spend too much time reading them. One of the interesting (but sad) phenomena that I noticed as I cataloged ethnic publications was that as time passed, and the first-generation immigrant communities died out, fewer and fewer of the newspapers were published in languages other than English. With assimilation came suppression of the mother tongue. Perhaps this is a reflection of immigrant life in America—the younger generations lose ties with original homelands, come under the influence of American media culture, and therefore completely assimilate into American life. This assimilation has both good and bad aspects, but its effect on multilingualism in the United States is profound. Ethnic newspapers, like other newspapers, exist in a changing media environment. The future environment is predicted in the videos EPIC 2014 and EPIC 2015 created by Robin Sloan, Matt Thomson, with music by Aaron McLeran, in which all news becomes crowd sourced
E-mail address: [email protected]. 0098-7913/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2012.04.009
trivia and the New York Times is pushed into print-only irrelevance by a vast electronic news network called the Evolving Personalized Information Construct or EPIC (Sloan & Thomson, 2012). I hope that ethnic newspapers will not succumb to the EPIC future. Because I was curious to learn from experts about the future of the ethnic press, I contacted James Danky for an American perspective and Thomas Saras for a Canadian perspective. James Danky worked with the United States Newspaper Program for which he devised a list of “intended audience” terms representing the various ethnic, political and other groups of American newspaper readers to facilitate access to these publications (Danky, 1986). He has served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 1990 where he taught “Mass Media and Minorities” for a decade. Danky was the Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society for thirty-five years until his retirement in 2007. In 1987 he was awarded the Bowker Ulrich's Serials Librarianship Award and in 2002 the Isadore Gilbert Mudge Award, both from the American Library Association. He is the author of three dozen books including African-American Newspapers and Periodicals (Harvard, 1998) and Native American Periodicals and Newspapers (Greenwood, 1984). In 1992 Danky co-founded the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America (now Print and Digital Culture) and directed its work until 2006. In addition to editing a number of volumes for the Center including Print Culture in a Diverse America (Illinois, 1998; winner of the Carry McWilliams Award), Danky's “Reading, Writing, and Resisting: African American Print Culture” appeared in A History of the Book in America 1880–1940, volume 4 (North Carolina, 2009). James generously agreed to an interview to share his ideas about the future of the ethnic press in America as well as his thoughts about library service relating to ethnic publications. Thomas Saras is the president, chief executive officer and chair of the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada (NEPMCC). The NEPMCC is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote and integrate economic, social and culture interests of ethnic communities into the mainstream of Canadian society. A major part of its mission is “To gather and disseminate information which will lead to a better understanding and cooperation among the various
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ethnic groups in Canada and the mainstream society” (see http:// nepmcc.ca/). In addition to responsibilities with NEPMCC, Saras serves as the editor-in-chief of the Greek language monthly publication Patrides, which is centered in Toronto and distributed across Canada and the United States (see http://www.patrides.com/). Saras kindly agreed to respond to my questions relating to the Canadian ethnic publications environment. 2. Interview with James Danky Faye Leibowitz (FL): How did you become interested in the ethnic press? James Danky (JD): I think that I became interested in the ethnic press by virtue of growing up in Los Angeles, which is a huge, multi-ethnic community, now more so than it was in the 1950s or 1960s. Certainly, it was incredibly rich. I would say that I've never been to a more multicultural school than my elementary school, Hoover Street, which is in the Korea Town/Pico Union neighborhood, for those who know Los Angeles. You could view people of Mexican descent reading La Opinión, people from China reading Chinese language newspapers, all of which were produced in Los Angeles. So I was aware of it then. It really was heightened in the 1960s with the invention of the alternative press, titles like the Los Angeles Free Press and many, many others across the country, that de-center, deemphasize, to be gentle and charitable, the role of the mainstream media. These publications began to produce stories and perspectives that you wouldn't find, in my case, in the Los Angeles Times, or nationally, in the New York Times. It showed that there was a variety of media out there. Then, I would suppose that lastly, in my library job at the Wisconsin Historical Society, I was immediately thrust into a collection that had a large volume of ethnic press from the U.S. and Canada. That wealth of titles meant that I had to figure out which new ones should be added and what should be emphasized and the like. That gave me entrée into a national conversation with librarians and scholars about the ethic press from the early seventies on. FL: How do ethnic periodicals serve as the memory of a culture? JD: I think that the ethnic press does provide the memory of a culture. That's the function of a kind of question that librarians see all the time: a student has to write some kind of paper that looks into the history of a particular community, group, or person and frequently the answer to the question will be found in the ethnic press rather than in the mainstream press, for some reasons that we'll discuss later. These publications are the ones that are more likely to care about a particular community. If that's overstating it, you can at least think of them as being concerned with the fine grain of events in a particular community. They draw distinctions that are invisible for lots of different reasons in the mainstream media because they have the sources. They also know their consumers—their audience cares deeply about distinctions that are masked for cultural reasons in the majority population. For example, when the majority population sees, if they see at all, the Latino communities, they would think of Catholicism, but they wouldn't necessarily understand the amazing, rapid rise of Evangelical movements within Latin communities in America. And yes, ethnic periodicals do provide this memory, because that is who they are, and that's who their audience is. They have to have and do have that cultural resonance. They can note the important festivals of the year. We just had Dia de los Muertos, which is a major event in the Mexican diaspora, and that's one that would very infrequently make its way into the mainstream media. FL: Can the ethnic press serve as a motivator for economic and social change in a community? JD: Absolutely! The ethnic media are going to be able to advocate, in an open and enthusiastic fashion, for economic opportunities in minority communities in a way that you are less likely to find in the mainstream press. These publications know their communities— they know their specific needs. You could take a national issue at
the moment, such as high unemployment—we know that if you look at the ways that unemployment is deeply stratified by ethnicity in America with very, very disparate rates between African American communities and white communities and with Latino communities in between, they understand the problem and thus can advocate very particular kinds of solutions that you wouldn't find in a mainstream newspaper. In a study I've done informally several times in my classes, you have the students read a week's worth of the business section in the mainstream daily papers to try to find minority stories and references, and very frequently, they come up with zero. The business world being described in the business pages is a world of homogenized, primarily white society, which misses all of the small businesses that your eyes and all your other senses tell you are there when you simply drive through ethnic neighborhoods in any American city that I'm familiar with. In terms of social change, some issues are found in the mainstream media – take your pick – the Rodney King acquittal riot, obviously a national if not an international media issue. But there are thousands and thousands of other kinds of issues that only have a chance to have their voices heard through the ethnic media—they don't show up in mainstream media in newspapers. This is the same way that in small towns you'll have a police report, but in major American cities it just wouldn't be possible because there is too much crime. That focus again is on the fine grain that you'll find in the ethnic press that you don't find elsewhere. The role of religious figures in the ethnic press is a notable distinction between them. I think you'd surely find that the religious persona of African American pastors intermingled deeply with looking at social justice. I don't mean just a national figure such as Jesse Jackson, but you find it in all communities. FL: Do different ethnic communities use ethnic periodicals in different ways and for different purposes? JD: Different ethnic communities certainly use their ethnic media in very different ways. For example, older immigrant communities such as a very long-standing white ethnic community like the Irish have different kinds of needs because they are assimilated by race and economic status to a very different degree, even though there has been continuing immigration from places like Ireland, now more so than a few years ago. It's an older integrated community. But in communities where there is a strong, contemporary immigration, it is very different. They need to provide informational services that help empower those communities and a lot of it is trying to deal with the incoming arrivals who will, in general, have much less English at their disposal and have a wealth of issues. You see this when you look at the advertising pages. For example, you'll see advertisements for immigration lawyers, something that you don't see in the mainstream media. It's not that there aren't immigration lawyers that would serve a white majority population. That's not a service that is offered as often. I think that a lot has to do with the phenomenon of how long a group, at least the majority of that group, has been in America, and the longer that they've been here, the less likely they are to be deeply engaged in events in the culture of origin. It doesn't mean that they are disinterested in them, just that interest may only flower on ceremonial occasions. The best example would be to look at British Americans, in the sense that they've been here a long time, or Scots Americans, to look at a subset. I'm hard pressed to think of someone who is a Scots American, at least by surname, who is either familiar with or passionate about events in Scotland. FL: I'll bet that a lot of those people have lost their ethnic identities. JD: Sure. Within many individuals, they have the ability to choose which ethnicity they want to be or to emphasize. I have a good friend whose father was German and whose mother was Irish, but she never mentions her German roots—she's only interested in emphasizing her Irish roots. Where race is not an inhibitor to that, people can and do make those choices. This comes through most profoundly in the last two federal censuses, where people were allowed to check
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more than one ethnicity, and there were radical rises in the number of people who were part Native American. Now this is self-reported, but the idea is that a white majority, but not exclusively white (African Americans can do it, too) will go in and choose Native American ancestors. There are vast numbers of Americans amongst the 300,000,000 of us where we have that option. FL: What are the positive and negative aspects of assimilating an ethnic community into the larger culture? What role does the ethnic press play in this process? JD: It's beyond a question of positive and negative. The process of assimilation, I think, can be best understood in terms of the “costs” that are assigned by the majority society. The whole process of acculturation and education that leads towards citizenship in this country has been in place formally since the 1920s with many other changes. The demands of learning English, of negotiating the demands of American society, particularly industrial society, extracted a particular kind of cost from immigrant communities. That is, they had to adapt in a lot of ways if they were to prosper in the ways that they hoped they would in this country. Perhaps the clearest marker for us who stand outside of those communities is language retention. The majority of Americans are monolingual people, except when you get to immigrant communities. The role of language or the ability to speak a particular language really plummets over the generations. And that's not just an American phenomenon but is true globally where you see every so often an article on the crisis of disappearing languages, how many are being lost each day, how there's only one speaker left. New York City is a good example of that—a recent article indicated that there were 800 different languages spoken in New York City, which is really quite daunting! I was always more impressed with the smaller reported number of 150–200 languages spoken by kids in the school districts in Los Angeles and New York. Eight hundred is really a gigantic number, but some of these languages are spoken by relatively few people. There are Mayan dialects, a particular example that comes to mind. But most of all, the giant phenomenon is that you get some kind of homogenization of language skills where it becomes less after one generation and drops again dramatically, etc. There will always be somebody whose parents force him to learn a particular language, but it's vastly more common to find a situation where only the grandparents speak the language, and the grandkids don't. So what is it that survives that sort of assimilation process? Well, the wearing of ethnic costumes, the making of ethnic foods. If you live in the small town that I live in, Stoughton, Wisconsin, which is a Norwegian American community, we put up American flags on Main Street, we celebrate Syttende Mai, but the high school hasn't offered Norwegian in years. So it gets down to a caricature of itself—people wear Norwegian costumes for one day a year and eat lutefisk, krumkake and sort of leave it at that. But it's not dynamic and there are lots of reasons for that which I referenced earlier, because there are relatively few Norwegians who emigrate to the U.S., and if they do, they're not coming to Stoughton, Wisconsin or other small towns—they go to New York City. FL: That is probably why they have so many languages there, because they have so many recent immigrants. JD: They have international immigrants who will come and live for a while and go back to their home countries, too. But I think that the story of immigration too little reflects the historically massive return of immigrants – people who come here, whether from Mexico or further south, or whether they came from Europe in the nineteenth century – huge numbers of people returned. They did not stay here. I know that from my wife's family, her grandfather came here from Germany in the twenties, but his brother was here for a brief period and then just went back. For all kinds of reasons – cultural, ethnic, economic – but I think that the general mythology is that the poor and tired arrived at Ellis Island and everybody stayed, and that's just not true. And I think that reflects the dynamism of ethnic
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communities—for many years, in many different communities, there's a great transportation loop between those places. We certainly read about that with regard to Mexico and Central America today— migrants coming and going back. I mean, more migrants have returned to Mexico and Central America because of the global economic collapse in the U.S. than I'm sure the fences kept out. That's an unsupported statement, but I'll bet it's true! FL: In the ethnic press, too, over the generations, I've noticed that you find less and less original language. The publication might still exist, but, over time, in the United States, anyway, it becomes more English than Italian or German or whatever language. JD: An interesting case study would be the Polish press in America, where after the rise of Solidarity, twenty five—plus, thirty years ago, suddenly there was a boom of migrants from Poland. But prior to that, the number of Polish speakers and readers had been declining precipitously, just as it does for any group. But then they got kind of a bump there, and that revived some of it. But today in America I'm sure that there are a relatively small number of Polish language newspapers. And likewise for any of the European groups, because they're here and need to learn English to function in a lot of aspects of American society. Not to say that there aren't people in immigrant communities who can get by just fine and not know the English language, but you don't find that true when their kids go to school. Their kids become, by circumstance, bilingual. They don't speak Vietnamese at school, but they speak Vietnamese at home. In earlier generations, my wife's family spoke German at home but went to school in English. And the press works exactly with that. The press is not a philanthropy—it provides a public service, a very important one, but the ethnic press needs to adapt to the need and demands of its community. If its community has a decline in the number of people speaking and reading the home language, they have to adjust beyond that. And you'll sometimes find this halfway state where you'll find papers that are bilingual. Sometimes it's translated; sometimes they'll only run an article on baseball in English, and they might run another one bilingual, in English and the home language, on soccer. FL: Do you feel that the future is brighter for those ethnic publications that are commercial, or for those that are non-profit? I guess that I'm interested in the economic aspects of the ethnic press. JD: Well, I think that there's only a future for the ethnic press if it can continue to attract readers and sell ads. And I guess that what I would do is to put a slight spin on the question—what has suffered tremendously, and this is true of the ethnic press as well as the largest of the mainstream press, are the business models. The intellectual and service models of newspapers are still valid, even if they reach a smaller number of people. We'll talk about that in a minute. But you can't, in my opinion, produce a newspaper to sell for a dollar or other nominal sum in a community where there are also people producing similar publications based on a free distribution model. The action has really totally switched to free distribution of newspapers. You'll find many that you have to pay for, but those are going to tend to be older, more specialized, and essentially not a general newspaper, even for that ethnic community. They will have paid subscriptions because there are people who choose to read them and no longer live in that geographical area. A wide array of newspapers (and librarians are particularly oblivious to them, here I'm thinking of in a public library more than in an academic library) are available on free distribution racks when you walk into the library. While I haven't walked into the Pittsburgh public library to see those racks, I can guess what publications I would likely find there. I might find Latino and African American weeklies, perhaps some Asian ones— it's hard to say. Whereas I would be less likely to find older, white immigrant publications from Polish or Croatian communities and so forth. But it's the business model that's been undercut there. If you're selling a Croatian weekly and you need to charge people for it, because the ads alone don't support it, that's going to be a more
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limited economic model than a publisher who is producing a Latino publication in Pittsburgh where they are going to support themselves through the sales of advertising. There are some that are non-profit, but the ethnic press, as is the mainstream press, is a commercial enterprise and will continue to evolve, prosper and fail as it meets commercial goals, as it produces the articles that attract readers and thus advertisers. For the mainstream press you've seen the rise of non-profit news organizations in some cities to take up slack or provide investigative reporting for things the mainstream newspapers used to do when they had larger staffs. For the ethnic press, I think that the future is in being diligent and creative in the commercial models that they are using. FL: What impact will emerging technologies have on the ethnic press? JD: Most ethnic newspapers, certainly the ones that serve more contemporary immigrant communities, all of them seem to have a Web presence, which can range from the full text of the publication to selected aspects of it. Increasingly, this is valuable for classified ads in the particular community, where they are going to duplicate some of the craigslist kind of success for a particular community. The barriers to entry are very low by comparison with the amount of money needed to print a newspaper, but the ethnic press needs to do both things simultaneously. Though they need to have a vigorous Web presence, because of the great digital divide by class in America, they will also need to have a paper presence out there for the foreseeable future. They need to be dynamic on both sides of that equation. FL: What are the best strategies for building ethnic press collections in libraries? JD: Well, I think that it comes down to two different suggestions, depending on if you're a public library or an academic library. They have very different audiences. For the public libraries, and this sounds so simplistic, if they would only pick up one each of everything that is distributed outside the security gates, and make sure that it is added to the collection, they would already be ahead of many existing public libraries. I've done field work for more than a decade on my AfricanAmerican Newspapers and Periodicals Bibliography. It was always astounding to me that you could visit public libraries, and titles that were available outside the security gate were not available in the libraries' collections themselves. What could be easier collection development than doing that? And frequently, these free distribution papers that cover an ethnic community are less likely to offer subscriptions. They are not set up for that. I've encountered enumerable ones that did not have a bulk mailing permit because everything was distributed in stacks in retail stores or public libraries. But it's exactly those kinds of publications that have the really micro approach to a particular community. In very large cities like Chicago I've observed many times that you can find papers, such as the ones serving the vast African American South Side, that are available in some neighborhoods but not in others. Essentially, these publications zone themselves—they are dominant in one area, but you are less likely to find them in a different area to the west. If librarians in the branch libraries could pick up those local publications and add them to their collections (public libraries are very “presentist,” and that's a good thing), they can potentially have historical materials. A branch library will then have the opportunity to gather up those older materials that are in less demand in the branch, and to give those older materials to the central headquarters branch, where perhaps they will be eventually available for digitization and preservation. For academic libraries, where we continue to experience the gigantic changes that digitization has brought, it seems increasingly true that students are unlikely to read much of anything that is not digitized. That's been my experience. And there are a variety of electronic products out there (the largest of them is Ethnic Newswatch from ProQuest) that provide the students with the breadth of perspectives on contemporary topics. For those doing historical research, there
have been a number of digitization products that have been sold to academic libraries that give them a wealth of materials in ways that are unprecedented, and essentially allow institutions to have the kind of volume of material that, with few exceptions, they would never have otherwise been likely to acquire in the preceding 150 years of libraries. To use a model that I have used in the past is to think globally, yes, but to collect locally. FL: Do you have any suggestions relating to best practices in public services relating to ethnic publications? What are the best ways to serve a community in terms of ethnic publications? JD: The best way to serve a community is, of course, to collect their publications. That is, to have the public service staff reminds their patrons that there is more than just the daily English language newspaper and Web sources. But the thing that every single day people in public services remind their patrons of, lay or academic, is that not everything is on the Web. Even though more than anyone could ever read is there, it doesn't mean that everything is there. And particularly in the case of ethnic publications, which are less likely to be ubiquitous than mainstream, English language materials, it's important for libraries to collect these materials, to have them available, so that they can feel connected to this particular kind of community. In a public library branch, if you serve a significant Latino or new Asian population, both groups have historically been hard to serve. There's a resonance between the information desires of the community and what the library collects. Don't just send them to the New York Times, as valuable as it is, but remember that there are lots and lots of other sources out there that will in many cases be far preferable in terms of providing the information that the patron wants. 3. Interview with Thomas Saras FL: How did you become interested in the ethnic press? TS: I am the editor-in-chief of Patrides, a publication with 160,000 copies per issue. Patrides circulates all over Canada and the States. We have been publishing for forty-one years. My personal experience in the area of ethnic publishing has made me aware of the need for organizing this sector. Recent uprisings of ethnic communities in England, France, Germany and other countries have confirmed to me the need for a strong organization of the ethnic press. FL: How do ethnic periodicals serve as the “memory” of a culture? TS: Every publication carries its stories in the language of the community, and some of them also in English or French. Language is one of the main elements of culture. Therefore, ethnic publications support the survival of the culture as well as supporting the memory of the heritage of the community. FL: Can the ethnic press serve as a motivator for economic and social change in a community? TS: If you review the constitution of NEPMCC, you will see that motivation of economic and social changes in the community is featured prominently in our objectives. FL: Do different ethnic communities use ethnic periodicals in different ways and for different purposes? TS: No. Most of our members are professional journalists. They love the job and they consider their publications to be a “labor of love.” The main objectives are to inform the community about the Canadian political and social realities and to inform the government of Canada about the ethnic communities and the problems that each one is facing. FL: What are the positive and negative aspects of assimilating an ethnic community into the larger culture? What role does the ethnic press play in this process? TS: Assimilating is a bad word. Integration is the right one. The ethnic press specifically helps communities to integrate into mainstream Canadian society. Assimilation is the American concept that relates to the “melting pot.” Here in Canada we are free to retain our cultural identity and yet to be good Canadians. The work of the ethnic press and media is to inform the citizen, in his own language,
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about events happening around him. Informing the members of the community about the affairs of the state helps them to understand the country and the political system, therefore making them good citizens prepared for their duties. In Canada, as in every other democracy, all citizens must be well informed. FL: Is the future brighter for commercial ethnic publications or for those that are non-profit? TS: Ethnic publications have their own very limited markets within their communities. It is rare that another community wants to advertise in a publication outside of the community, but it happens. At this point and for as long as new immigrants arrive in Canada to join these communities, ethnic publications will thrive. Every ethnic publication distributes a great number of copies for free in various community outlets. A smaller number is distributed through Canada Post by subscription and some others are sold at commercial outlets.
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FL: What impact will emerging technologies have on the ethnic press? TS: The publishers of ethnic press publications are adjusting faster than the mainstream media to emerging technologies. This is due to the fact that they are mostly family-owned companies in which the decision-making process is much faster than in big corporations. The Canadian government also helps in this effort by providing so called “innovation funds” to mainstream magazines as well as ethnic publishers. References Danky, J. P. (1986). Newspapers and their readers: The United States newspaper program's list of intended audience terms. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 6, 85–106. Sloan, R. & Thomson, M. (2012). EPIC 2014 and EPIC 2015. Retrieved from http://www. robinsloan.com/epic/ and http://epic.makingithappen.co.uk/