by Joshua Brustein
August 2, 2004

Newspaper statistics (Newspaper Association of America) and facts

Readership Of Dailies:

The Wall Street Journal -- 2,101,017
The New York Times -- 1,677, 003
New York Daily News -- 802,103
New York Post -- 678,012
Long Island Newsday -- 662,317
Hoy -- 109,598
Staten Island Advance -- 68,700
New York Sun -- 53,000
El Diario La Prensa -- 50,019

Sources - Audit Bureau of Circulations or the newspapers themselves

Henry Scott, the publisher of Metro New York -- the newest newspaper in the nation's last remaining newspaper town -- doesn't go a day without the New York Times.

"I get the Times home delivered, and I take it to work because I don't have time to read it beforehand," he said. "I carry it around all day, take it home with me, and if I have a few minutes before I go to bed I might read some of it. I think a lot of people are the same way."

This, argues Scott, is why New York needed to add yet another newspaper to the 40-some dailies already serving New Yorkers in about a half-dozen languages. A free "commuter daily" like his offers a quick read, a lightweight alternative to the heavy hitters like the Times.

This is the same argument put forth by Russell Pergament, the publisher of AM New York, a competing commuter daily launched late last year.

Everywhere else in the United States, newspapers are in decline -- 98 percent of American cities now have only one daily newspaper; the total number of newspapers in the country, and the total number of readers, has declined every year for the past two decades. In some ways, other news media offer even fewer choices, radio and television stations throughout the nation now dominated by just ten corporations. (See Who Owns New York's News?by Joanna Erenberg and Ian Manheimer)

But New York is the media capital of the world, headquarters for all the nation's television networks, home of an estimated 10,000 journalists, center of an information industry -- which includes not just newspapers, but book and magazine publishing, motion pictures, sound recording, broadcasting, and telecommunications -- that is the city's fourth largest "industry supersector," larger even than finance. Here newspapers still seem to matter, at least to the companies that own them.

But what does their vivid presence mean to New Yorkers and the city as a whole -- economically, politically, culturally, psychologically?

NEW YORK, NEWSPAPER TOWN
Not that long after New York printed its first newspaper, in 1725 (the paper had a fine name: the Gazette), the city became the kind of colorfully cut-throat newspaper town for which it is known to this day; publishers would race into the harbor to snatch scoops that came sailing in on British ships. By the late 1800's, the city had 29 daily newspapers, with two – the New York World and the New York Journal -- boasting daily circulations above one million.

With the exception of the Post and the Times, all of these papers have disappeared. But the city as legendary newspaper town remains (see Favorite Books about Newspapers in Gotham Gazette's book section), and not just because of the swashbuckling past. Newer newspapers have taken place of the old, and the New York Post, started by Alexander Hamilton in 1801 and the country's oldest continuingly published newspaper, is now in a well-publicized war with the New York Daily News, the country's original tabloid newspaper (an adjective originally meant only to describe its shape), which was founded in 1919.

New York now has about half a dozen major metropolitan, general-interest English-language dailies, depending on how you count (do you include Newsday, for example, based in Long Island and with spotty circulation in the city itself? How about the business-oriented Wall Street Journal, which shuns local news?). It also boasts some three times as many newspaper readers as Los Angeles, the country's second largest newspaper market. Of the fifteen highest-circulating daily papers in the country, four are published in New York City; there are also some 200 ethnic and community newspapers published in the city; and upstart dailies like the New York Sun continue to emerge, looking to carve their own niche.

Why is this happening here and nowhere else?

The answer is not much of a mystery. New York is both the largest "media market" and the nation's largest metropolitan area, the home of the greatest number of commuters who use public transportation. It is also diverse enough to make it difficult for one newspaper to appeal to everybody.

BENEFITS FOR THE CITY, ECONOMIC AND OTHERWISE
All of these newspapers employ reporters, editors, photographers, circulation managers, and many others. All said, the newspaper and periodical industry employed 53,100 employees as of May 2002, not including the countless number of independent journalists in New York who work as freelancers. The entire information industry, according to the city comptroller's office, employs more than 150,000 people, paying them about $9.5 billion in wages over the first three quarters of 2003. The industry also contributed nearly $600 million in city tax revenues.

Newspapers and other media provide intangible economic benefits as well, said Jonathan Schwabish, an economist with the Partnership for New York City.

"You've got the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which are probably two of the top five newspapers in the world," he said. "You're combining those, in New York City ... It just adds to the city's reputation as a global center, a global economic force, an entertainment center."

BENEFITS FOR PUBLISHERS (OTHER THAN ECONOMIC)
Operating in the country's biggest newspaper market doesn't necessarily pay off financially. The Times, which for the past half dozen years has deliberately positioned itself as a national newspaper rather than a local one, makes most of its money through its national circulation (half of its readers now living out of the metropolitan area). Few of New York's other papers could be called flush. Elsewhere in the country, newspaper profits continue to be strong even as readership drops; here it is just the opposite.

The Post and the News, in their competition for the city's readers, best illustrate the mixed blessing of publishing a newspaper in New York City.

The Post is enjoying some of the most rapid circulation growth in the country – its circulation rose 9.3 percent in the six months ending March 30 to 678,012 papers a day (the News has a daily circulation of 802,103). But the newspaper is also losing large amounts of money. Since Rupert Murdoch took over the Post almost 30 years ago, it has lost over $500 million.

While the specifics of the Daily News' finances are unknown, it is rumored to be barely profitable. The last time it made specific statistics public, in 1998, the News showed annual losses of over $20 million.

The high costs of maintaining a newspaper in this high-priced city – and the pressures of competition – make it harder for newspaper publishers in New York to make money than their counterparts elsewhere. But if even the most widely read newspapers are not financially successful, why continue to compete?

The widespread belief is that New York's big-time newspaper publishers are willing to subsidize their unprofitable enterprises to capture a different kind of coinage -- political influence.

Post owner Rupert Murdoch received a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission's regulations against owning different media outlets in the same market to buy the Post; he then used the newspaper to lobby for further leniency. His competitor, Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman, has pushed a variety of his own pet causes through his newspaper.

"In this tabloid war, the rules of modern capitalism are suspended," writes the New Yorker's media writer, Ken Auletta, in his book Backstory.

"While it is true that Murdoch cannot tell his directors that the Post has made money, he can surely confide that it has been good for News Corp," writes Auletta. "And, more personally, in the words of one close adviser, Murdoch knows that he has gotten 'his conservative precepts across in the biggest market in the country.'"

WHAT EFFECTS ON READERS?
Better Informed?
When Ben Smith began work for the New York Sun in 2001, having previously reported for the Indianapolis Star, he was struck by the "sense of competition and urgency here. It means," said Smith (who has since left the Sun to work for the weekly New York Observer), "that you wake up every morning and read your competitors with a certain amount of stress."

This competitive stress, some believe, results in fuller coverage, which makes New Yorkers better informed. "When you have people competing head-to-head, it makes people work harder," said John Morton, a newspaper analyst. "I think, overall, even overlooking some of the lapses, the readers are well served by this."

Readers apparently agree. According to a recent poll (in pdf format) some 45 percent of New Yorkers believe that the local media helps the city solve its problems, as opposed to 31 percent nationwide.

While local media also includes television and radio stations, many believe that newspapers continue to hold a special place in the news-producing world. The newspaper "may be in decline in certain age groups, and it may be in decline over the horizon, but it is still significant," said Steve Isenberg, who was the last publisher of New York Newsday (before the New York edition folded in 1995). "To my mind, it is still the spinal column for all other news. Every radio and every TV person begins their day with it; they all read the major papers."

It is not just the major English-language newspapers in New York that keep their readers better-informed. Two healthy Spanish-language dailies, Hoy and El Diario, target an immigrant readership with different sets of priorities and bases of knowledge who don't necessarily get what they need from the English-language press.

"In this paper, we are making a big effort to teach our readers how to integrate to this country, and to this city," said Javier Castaño, the news director of Hoy. "That's why we were covering the [Democratic and Republican National] Conventions, even before they started, with writing, pictures, and graphs explaining how the system works," he said. "We have that obligation, because our readers are new to this country and this city."

More Alarmed, Maligned, Misled?
Earlier this summer, gruesome crime stories filled the front pages of New York's newspapers, sparking some talk of a summer crime wave,and bringing Mayor Michael Bloomberg's boasts of a safe city into question.

"The fact is that the incidence of crime remains relatively low," Paul Browne, deputy commissioner of public information for the New York Police department, responded in the Times. "But the way it's covered you wouldn't necessarily know that." Browne claimed that the public's view on crime is distorted because news organizations devote the same amount of space covering it, even as the actual amount of crime has dropped.

This is not a new complaint. Some argue that crime in New York, and particularly in Central Park, was never as bad as the public perceived. Even when it was the universal symbol for urban chaos New York did not have the worst crime rate in the nation.

Distortion and error, some say, are the downside of a competition that can be overzealous and downright vicious. When the Post ran a front-page story last month mistakenly naming Dick Gephardt as the Democratic choice for vice presidential candidate, the News took pains to rub it in. After using the Post's cover to illustrate its own cover the next day – and delivering a case of champagne to the Post's office to congratulate it for the "exclusive" – the Daily News ran several days of stories gloating over its competitor's mistake, a long-running finger-pointing habit that both papers share.

This kind of gleeful harping also targets public figures, which some see as part of the tabloids' major identity and in many cases their strength. But by thriving on conflict, says Andrew White, the tabloids bully public officials into confronting one another, making New York politics all that much more contentious.

The attacks "are not necessarily substantive, they don't necessarily contribute in a meaningful way to the direction of the city's effectiveness," said White, the director of the Center for NYC Affairs at New School University, and the former editor of the monthly magazine City Limits. "But it's just a reality of New York City politics that you have to deal with."

THE NEW NEWSPAPERS
Given that so many New York newspapers are losing money, it might seem odd that publishers saw room for more. Odder still, AM New York's publisher, the Tribune Company, which also puts out Hoy and Newsday, is arguably creating its own competition. Already, the competitive pressure is clearly intense: recently, both Newsday and Hoy were caught in a scandal after inflating circulation numbers to lure readers away from their competitors.
So why add more papers to the mix?

Many say that there is no point, that these papers, with more than 50 times the number of hawkers -- or, as Scott prefers to call them, "street promoters" -- than reporters, are a passing fancy that do not add anything to coverage of the city. "Journalists and readers of well-informed journalism were disappointed" by the content in commuter dailies, said NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg, who is writing a book about local media coverage.

But the publishers of commuter dailies, as well as analysts such as Klinenberg, argue that they may wind up serving a specific and important purpose -- recruiting new readers to the world of newspapers. By offering the Internet generation instant gratification for free, these weekday handouts attract young readers in a way that heftier papers cannot, or so goes the theory. In other markets, such as Chicago, it is the major daily newspapers that have started commuter dailies, grooming young readers who, they hope, will graduate on to a more substantive paper later in life.

Scott of Metro New York subscribes wholeheartedly to this idea.

"We are developing, I hope, a new cadre of newspaper readers," he said. "My guess is, as our readers grow older, they may turn to a newspaper like the New York Times, the Daily News, or the New York Post, which are focused on an older audience."

But New York's other commuter daily, AM New York, takes offense at the "training wheel" theory. In comparison to Metro -- and to other commuter dailies throughout the country – the paper sees itself as doing the job of a conventional newspaper, albeit on a much smaller scale. (Its masthead lists nine editors and two reporters.)

Russell Pergament, AM New York's publisher, keeps a thick stack of newspaper clippings in his office. Within minutes, he fills the conference table with them – each one a story that his paper broke, with copies of stories that other newspapers wrote after picking up the leads – as he explains what he thinks a newspaper should do.

"When I was a kid, I ran a paper out of my garage. We got people run up the river," says Pergament. At AM New York, he is most proud of a story that served a similar purpose, by exposing mismanagement of the Statue of Liberty Foundation. After AM New York broke the story, the New York Times quickly turned it into a front-page feature, sparking a federal investigation.

"Based on the work [we're] doing, it is a good newspaper, forget the qualifying 'free'," said Pergament. "And I hope that by the fall we'll be a very good newspaper."

ROOM FOR MORE?
There isn't an agreed-upon length of time that it takes for a new newspaper to take hold in the city, either as a financial success or as a significant political presence.

The New York Sun, which started more than two years ago and claims 53,000 readers, seems willing to lose money for years to come in order to establish itself as a conservative alternative to the Times.

"Success will be measured by two things: whether we make money, and whether we meet our idealistic goals," said the Sun's publisher, Seth Lipsky. "We're a long way from both."

But analysts seem doubtful that the publishers of AM New York and Metro will tolerate losing money for much more than three years. And it is too soon to judge whether the new newspaper model will have much of an effect on other papers in the city, or on how New Yorkers get their news.

As for the competing commuter dailies, each one insists that it is not in competition with the other, though everyone else agrees that they are, and expresses doubt that both will last.

That said, many believe that one of them will make it. Like all New York newspapers, after all, they do have at least one thing working in their favor.

"Everyone needs to read on the subway," said Smith. "What else can you do? Cell phones don't work."
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Who Owns New York's News?
by Joanna Erenberg and Ian Manheimer
August 2, 2004

Days after September 11th, 2001, Clear Channel Communications, America's largest radio conglomerate, which owns five radios stations in New York and over 1,200 nationwide, released a memo listing 150 songs that it felt were in "bad taste" to play on the radio. The songs included everything from Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" to John Lennon's "Imagine."

It has been widely debated whether the memo was official guideline for all stations, but many believe that the Texas-based management - which has ties to the Republican Party - wanted to censor the airwaves.

The concentrated ownership of the media makes this possible. And even though New Yorkers are in a better situation than most other places of the country – we have, for instance, eight local daily newspapers in Spanish and English owned by six different companies – media consolidation gives a small group of people huge influence over what we see and hear.

In July, Clear Channel again used its clout in an attempt to stop New Yorkers from getting certain messages, when it tried to block an antiwar group from renting advertising space in Times Square during the Republican National Convention.

Shrinking Choices, Silenced Voices
But Clear Channel is not the only monster conglomerate that is changing the choices for the public. Since 1983, the fifty corporations that dominated the American media market have become ten corporations, the consolidation reaching a kind of apogee when AOL and Time Warner joined together in the largest media merger in history, a corporation valued at $350 billion.

These mergers occurred thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which Congress passed in the belief that the radio industry would thrive with less regulation. The new law increased how many American media outlets any one company could own or operate, while retaining certain limits.

But in the first five years after the bill's passage, 9,000 out of 10,000 existing radio stations nationwide were sold at least once, according to research by Common Cause (where we work). The result? An array of voices and choices in large markets across the nation were soon silenced or curtailed.

"In New York City, the top four companies control 80 percent of the [radio] market," says Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition. The top ten rated FM stations in New York City are owned by four companies: Clear Channel Communications, Emmis Communications, Spanish Broadcasting System, and Viacom. Radio station WEVD, was sold in 2001 to the Walt Disney Company media conglomerate, and the local, independent, multi-lingual station was reformatted into just another outlet for the sports network ESPN Radio.

In June of 2003, the Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that regulates all sources of American communications, issued new regulations that loosened many of the ownership caps established in the Telecommunications Act. Under the new regulations, a single corporation could own television stations reaching up to 45 percent of American households nationwide; cross-ownership rules were changed so that a company could own newspapers, radio and television stations in the same market.

The rule changes were opposed from all ends of the political spectrum. Groups from the National Rifle Association to the National Organization for Women saw the control of media by just a few voice as a fundamental threat to the diversity and localism of viewpoints necessary for democracy. The Federal Communications Commission was flooded with over 2 million communications from concerned Americans – more than they had received for any other issue.

Despite the outcry, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell stood by the decision. The matter was taken up in Congress and the courts, and continues to be fought today.

BOTTOM LINE JOURNALISM
The growth of media conglomerates has created a highly competitive and cut-throat industry where business economics plays an increasingly large role in production and even editorial decisions. Companies, searching to cut costs and meet revenue goals, have been using standard corporate business models to alter the behind the scenes production of their press, while trying to find ways to appeal to the broadest possible audiences. Journalists' jobs and responsibilities have been rapidly changing in what is a drastically different industry than the locally owned and operated business structure of broadcasts past.

"In the last twenty years, rigorous issues-oriented journalism has been under continued attack by large commercial interests seeking to streamline operations, tighten payroll, control more outlets, deregulate the industry and, ultimately, fatten their bottom line," said Timothy Karr, executive director of MediaChannel.org. "The net negative result is a news industry that avoids politically sensitive topics in favor of cheaply available entertainment, trivia and 'lifestyle' reporting."

Indeed, a recent poll found that some two-thirds of working journalists believe that "bottom line pressure is 'seriously hurting' the quality of news coverage." A majority of their bosses disagreed that the changes were undermining quality. It is difficult to conclude otherwise, though, when given examples such as New York's Channel 9, which Rupert Murdoch's company News Corp. purchased in 2002. The newsroom for the station was combined with that of another Murdoch property, Fox Channel 5, both stations' newscasts now overseen by a single news director -- and 65 jobs eliminated.

NEW YORKERS OWN THE AIRWAVES
Opponents of further media consolidation see hope in educating the public about the fact that the American people, and not corporate conglomerates, actually own the airwaves. The broadcast airwaves are licensed by the Federal Communications Commission to companies for free, in exchange for their promise to provide programming and content that serves the public's best interest.

In 2001, it was estimated that if the airwaves used by the broadcasters were actually sold at auction to corporations – which has been a common practice with other technologies – it would have brought in $367 billion to the public treasury.

"Broadcasters cannot have it one way -- receive special treatment from the government -- but give nothing in return," said Karr. "With the outcry in 2003, the public sent Big Media and the FCC a loud message. The media industry can no longer put profits before its duty to serve citizens in a democracy. The media reform movement is now well mobilized to ensure that the FCC weighs the public's best interests before handing out more to media corporations."

Joanna Erenberg works on issues of media consolidation in New York as special projects coordinator for Common Cause/NY, where Ian Manheim is an intern.

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Media moguls have every reason to fear the Internet as a source of news and information exchange, as well as the rising number of ethnic publications that have, at the local level, more power and credibility:

NYC's Ethnic Press

by Abby Scher

When the police killed Patrick Dorismond last year, the mainstream New York dailies certainly covered the uproar that followed . But they did not report about it the way New York City's four Haitian newspapers did. The Haitian papers went beyond the incident involving Dorismond, who was a Haitian immigrant, to chronicle the community's growing frustration at its lack of political clout in challenging the police. At a town meeting last April, reported by the weekly English language paper Haitian Times, civic leaders asked why, despite a local population of more than 300,000, Haitians had not managed to elect a single major public official.

This year, the Haitian papers are writing about the two Haitian candidates vying for Una Clarke's seat on the City Council, and the two other Haitians running for Lloyd Henry's City Council seat.

Indeed, the call for political clout echoes through out the astonishing number of mostly new ethnic newspapers and magazines in the city, as they all gear up to cover "hometown" candidates.

The results could be surprising, because there is an unprecedented boom in New York's ethnic press. At least 198 magazines and newspapers are now publishing in 36 languages. There are seven New York daily newspapers in Chinese! Readers come from more than 50 nations or ethnic groups. These are mostly immigrants, but there has been a spurt in publications for long-settled African-American and Latino readers as well. Dailies Web Site Circulation Ethnic Group
World Journal 360,000 (nationally); 134,400 (East Coast) Chinese
Daily Challenge thedailychallenge.com 81,630 Black
America Oggi 65,000 (nationally); 23,000 (NYC) Italian
Novoye Russkoye Slovo www.nrs.com 55,000 Russian
El Diario 54,500** Latino
Hoy 50,300** Latino
Sing Tao www.singtao.com 50,000 Chinese
El Nacional 44,000 Dominican
Korea Times 40,000 Korean
China Press www.chinapress.com 40,000 Chinese
* from Audit Bureau of Circulation as of September 2000

This is the largest number of ethnic publications in the city's history. By contrast, during the last great wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, one scholar counted just 146 immigrant newspapers

THE RISE

There are more than three million immigrants in New York City, half a million of whom arrived in the four years after 1992, when Congress passed a diversity law that allowed in large numbers from nations where few had come before. They came from Bangladesh and Egypt, from China and the Philippines, from countries in Africa and from the former Soviet republics.

And, supported by a steadily growing economy, all these groups created their own publications. New York has become the ethnic media capital of the world. It is not just New Yorkers who read these New York-based newspapers. So do immigrants who live in areas where their numbers are too small to support a local paper.

Though there are more ethnic newspapers now in New York than a century ago, their circulation is general lower than the papers from the past. Some of the old Yiddish and Italian papers from the turn of the century could have a million readers. No Spanish-language daily has a circulation over 70,000, and all seven Chinese language dailies have a combined circulation of half a million. Weeklies Web Site Circulation
Jewish Herald 288,000
Algemeiner Journal (Yiddish) 250,000
Caribbean Life (free) 125,000
Jewish Press 96,000
Irish Voice 88,000
Haiti Observateur www.haiti-observateur.com 75,000
U.S. Frontline (Japanese) 69,800
La Voz Hispana 68,000
NY Carib News www.nycaribnews.com 67,000
Irish Echo www.irishecho.com 65,000

Still, the increase has been dramatic. The same Chinese papers had only 170,000 readers a decade ago. The number of Polish and Russian language newspapers has grown easily by a third since then. The Indian community, which had one newspaper 25 years ago, now has at least eight, with a combined circulation of 212,300.

On the right newsstand, you will find a choice of newspapers for Jamaicans (Weekly Gleaner, or Weekly Star), Guyanese (Guyana Monitor), Dominican (El Nacional), Filipino (there are four), and Ecuadorian (Ecuador News), all written and published in the metropolitan area.

THE BLACK PRESS

Unnoticed by outsiders, the African press of New York has grown astronomically to five magazines and three newspapers.

But it is not just newspapers for black immigrants that have flourished. While some cities have no black newspapers, the 24 percent of New Yorkers who are African American have a choice of ten, including The Daily Challenge, a black daily that also caters to Caribbean and African immigrants. Many of the black papers are community papers with a strong regional base, like Black Reign of Staten Island, Our Time Press, which covers Bed Stuy, and the Amsterdam News, a city-wide paper whose special home is Harlem.

Many of these papers -- like a few of the new immigrant newspapers -- sidestep the perennial problem of winning space on crowded newsstands by giving the papers away for free, borrowing the successful business model of many community newspapers.

THE SPANISH-LANGUAGE PRESS

The 29 percent of New Yorkers who are Hispanic have four Spanish-language dailies, including one, El Nacional, that particularly targets the new Dominican New Yorkers. They also can pick up one of at least 13 weekly or monthly newspapers that focus on their family's country of origin, including Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico.

In a new trend, a few of the new neighborhood newspapers are bilingual, with local news in Spanish and in English, building a readership across ethnic groups. These include Manhattan Times in Washington Heights and Highbridge Horizon in the Bronx, both founded within the last two years. La Voz de Queens is another newcomer published in both Spanish and English. Dailies by Ethnic Group
Chinese 7
Latino 4
Polish 3
Korean 3
Greek 2
Russian 1
Italian 1
Black 1

INDEPENDENT -- FOR NOW

While corporations own 86 percent of English-language newspapers in the United States, many ethnic publications continue to follow the path of family-owned papers and invest whatever they earn back into their enterprise.

This is not always the case. Media companies in Taiwan and Hong Kong own the major Chinese papers in New York. Last year, the Greek daily Proini sold a major ownership stake to a Greek newspaper company. The small Courier Life chain in Brooklyn runs a free Caribbean paper, Caribbean Life (with a circulation of 125,000) as well as a free Chinese monthly, and is continually looking for new papers to take over. The Star and the Gleaner, two dailies owned by the same monopoly in Jamaica, followed their readers to New York and formed weeklies of the same name to serve them. Similarly, in the Korean community, The Korea Central Daily News is the US edition of a Samsung-owned daily in Korea. Some of the newspapers even have their own radio or television stations, including the News India-Times.

But in general the ethnic media, unlike that of the English-speaking world, is independent, and not so profitable. There are a number of ethnic newspapermen, like Safieelvin Dyab, the editor of Astoria's Arab Post, who support their newspaper by holding down another job (as a correspondent for the BBC), because the ad world has not yet discovered them. Frequency of Ethnic Publications
Dailies 24
Thrice weekly 2
Weeklies 98
Twice monthly 20
Monthly 24
Bimonthly 10
Quarterly 7
irregular 3
Twice yearly 1
Total 189

POLITICS AND THE PRESS

When the network news covers communities of color, it tends to emphasize crime stories or colorful ethnic festivals. Even the broadcasts of the Spanish language networks in New York focus on crime news, according to Marta Garcia of the New York Hispanic Media Coalition. The group's preliminary research shows a similar trend in the daily Spanish-language press.

Often, though, ethnic newspapers and magazines wind up building potent communities, and promoting a political consciousness, even if they are not consciously trying to.

Sometimes this happens simply because they are catering to their readers' needs and interests. Irish Voice editor Debbie McGoldrick is so committed to covering immigration problems that she serves as a sort of Dear Abby in a regular advice column. Some immigrant newspapers aggressively cover labor problems that are only given token coverage in the mainstream press. Two of the seven Bangladeshi newspapers (Weekly Thikana and New Probashi) are known for their quality reporting on the dangers faced by construction workers as well as other day workers.

By covering the news of the entire home region, the papers often dissolve distinctions that had been active back home, creating a broader solidarity. This is a process that happened early in the 20th century, when large New York dailies treated their readers as immigrants from "Italy" or "Germany" -- not from Genoa, Naples or Saxony.

The editors also often prod their readers to lobby the federal government on policies affecting their home country. Karl Rodney, editor in chief of Carib News, listed international trade as a major area of news interest. The feds backed the "wrong side" in the banana dispute in the World Trade Organization, says Rodney, which challenged Europe's favored trade with Caribbean banana producers, and now the industry in three island countries is threatened.

But the ethnic press is not just urging action back home. Many publications interpret American life for their readers, chronicle the struggles of the immigrants here -- and take an active role in helping their readers think of themselves as political actors and as a political constituency. You'll see local politicians at events held by the Russian Forward and Sada-e-Pakistan in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, or by the Haitian Times a few miles north.

If the new immigrant press is largely less ideological than papers published by earlier immigrants (there was an Italian language anarchist paper into the 1970s), it still often retains a political cast. The Caribbean press tends to be centrist to conservative. (Progressives in that community might pick up the Daily Challenge). Haitians have a choice of a conservative, two centrist and a progressive paper. Many of the Latin American weeklies are more conservative than the two daily Spanish-language powerhouses, Hoy and El Diario. But there are also progressive weeklies such as La Voz de Queens and La Voz de Mexico.

Whatever their views, the near future will determine just how effective their politics really are. The fall elections will demonstrate whether they have the power to help elect public officials who directly represent the 40 percent of New Yorkers who now are immigrants.

Abby Scher is a sociologist and director of the Independent Press Association-New York. She is coeditor of Many Voices, One City, a directory of the ethnic press in New York