Another one bites the dust
Newspapers are having a much more difficult time than magazines. Most people are getting their news off the net. What’s more, want ads, which have been traditionally a major source of income for newspapers, have all gone to the net. The most difficult part of this is that it’s really hard for newspapers to monetize their websites. There are major discussions about the impact this will have on journalism as a whole as more newspapers dissolve.
Plan to Close Chinese-Language Paper Deepens a Shadow Over the Ethnic Press
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: January 22, 2009
There is nothing overt at the modest headquarters of The Ming Pao Daily News to suggest that the 12-year-old newspaper is under siege. In the paper’s small warren of offices in an industrial building in Long Island City, Queens, the advertising and reporting staffs are still working the phones and putting out their scrappy broadsheet as if nothing were amiss.
The Ming Pao Daily News, one of four Chinese-language dailies in New York, is set to close.
But looming over the entire enterprise is a plan by the paper’s corporate parent, Media Chinese International Limited, based in Hong Kong, to shut it down. Though the plan has yet to be formally announced, and several of the paper’s employees said they still remained in the dark about their future, the paper’s general manager confirmed in an interview with The New York Times last week that the daily would indeed disappear from newsstands, possibly as soon as the end of the month.
News of Ming Pao’s demise has shaken New York’s ethnic press industry, which until recently remained extremely robust but, like many other industries, has been buffeted by the nation’s economic slowdown in the past few months.
In recent weeks, two other prominent ethnic newspapers have also closed. Hoy New York, a Spanish-language daily started in 1998, published its last print issue on Dec. 30, though it retains a presence on the Internet. AsianWeek, a widely respected English-language Asian-American weekly based in San Francisco, published its last print issue on Jan. 2, though it, too, remains online.
Ning Wang, editor in chief of The Sing Tao Daily, one of Ming Pao’s three rival Chinese-language dailies in New York, said Ming Pao’s departure would diminish the city’s Chinese-American community, which as recently as the mid-1980s supported 10 daily newspapers.
“For the community it’s a very depressing thing,” Mr. Wang said.
But in an interview, Ming Pao’s general manager, Thong Lai Teng, said that the news was not all bad and cast the paper’s closing as something of a new beginning.
While the company planned to cease publication of the daily, which costs 50 cents a copy on the newsstand, it would continue publishing a free, six-day-a-week newspaper, called MP (NY) Free Daily, introduced more than a year ago.
The Ming Pao staff has already been supplying most of the free daily’s content, Mr. Teng said. And though there would be some layoffs, he added, most of the workers would remain, ensuring that The Ming Pao Daily News would survive in substance and spirit, if not in name.
He said the shift and belt-tightening were necessary for the company to stay alive.
“We are here to stay!” he exclaimed, with a bit more gusto than the paper’s struggles would seem to allow.
Circulation of the free daily has been increasing in proportion to the decrease in the paid daily’s circulation, propelled by an enthusiastic response from advertisers, Mr. Teng claimed.
Some 35,000 copies of the free daily are distributed daily, he said. Meanwhile, he added, the circulation of the paid daily has declined significantly from about 45,000 early last year, though he did not divulge the current circulation numbers.
News of Ming Pao’s plans have filtered out in a curious way. Two rival newspapers published thinly sourced articles in late December reporting Ming Pao’s closure. Then in an article on Dec. 31, Ming Pao published a vague article about the change.
But when first approached about the plans last week, the paper’s staff members and managers refused to confirm the closing, deferring instead to the corporate parent company for comment. When it was pointed out to Mr. Teng that the corporation’s plans had already been reported by one of his own correspondents, he appeared confused, then insisted that the article had been printed prematurely. “The editor wasn’t in the office that day,” he said.
Analysts of the ethnic news media say that Ming Pao’s plans, and the recent closings of Hoy and AsianWeek, are most likely a harbinger of much more contraction in this sector of the media industry.
Until the middle of last year, analysts say, the ethnic press was largely insulated from the vicissitudes of the newspaper industry, including severe downturns in advertising revenue and circulation, which have brought many mainstream newspapers to their knees.
Devoutly focused on local, largely immigrant communities, ethnic newspapers provide readers with news particular to those populations and reports from the immigrants’ homelands that are hard to find elsewhere. They also address the specific needs of immigrants trying to adjust to a new country and new lifestyle.
“People don’t necessarily see themselves reflected in the mainstream media, so different cultural populations were turning to the ethnic media more and more,” said Cristina L. Azocar, director of the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism at San Francisco State University.
In addition, advertisers are often the neighbors and acquaintances of the newspapers’ staff, creating an intimate relationship between the newspapers and the communities they serve, analysts said. Many ethnic papers have not gone online in any comprehensive way, but until the broader economic downturn, that did not much matter since much of the readership, particularly in working-class and poorer communities, may not have been connected to the Internet anyway.
But beginning last year, growth in the ethnic press began to level off and the footing of many papers has not been secure enough to withstand the recession.
Ethnic newspapers are now having to scramble to stay alive, cutting staff, printing less frequently and shifting to the Internet.
“Some are finding very innovative ways to keep afloat and others are committed to operating in the red,” said Sandy Close, director of New America Media, a nationwide association of more than 2,000 ethnic media organizations.
According to several current and former Ming Pao staff members, the paper has always struggled to find a niche for itself in the rough-and-tumble market of Chinese-language dailies.
Ming Pao was founded in 1997 as an offshoot of a well-respected daily in Hong Kong that also publishes iterations in San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver. It has tried to cast itself as the most intellectual of the four Chinese-language dailies in New York, mirroring the reputation of the Hong Kong paper. But it has not been able to cut deeply enough into their market share, industry experts say.
An employee smoking a cigarette outside Ming Pao’s offices in Long Island City last week said he was unsettled by the possibility of layoffs, but he was also philosophical about the matter. The economic malaise, he pointed out, was ubiquitous. “It’s happening to everybody,” he shrugged. “Not just us.”
That helps us keep our numbers up. Of course, buying us at the newsstand helps too.
