Do ethnic papers have an advantage over mainstream papers?

Written for Editors Weblog on March 17, 2009 at 3:47 PM

While papers all over the United States disintegrated in the last year, ethnic papers are said to be thriving, unlike what was reported on March 6, 2009.

Although the ethnic papers have also felt pressure during rough financial times, according to the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, ethnic papers find themselves better off than mainstream American papers. El Diario la Prensa is the oldest Spanish language paper in the US and has seen a better year than many other papers. According to the executive editor, Alberto Vourvoulias in an interview by Brooke Gladstone for "On the media", NPR, El Diario owes its success to its audience, which consists of immigrants from every country in Latin America.

"Many of our readers don't have desk jobs, which means they don't spend all day in front of a monitor checking up on websites to see what the latest news is. And, therefore, they take the paper into the office, share it with the people they work with, take it home at night and share it with their families," said Vourvoulias.

Ethnic papers in the US have found that the survival of print journalism boils down to having a very specific target audience. They publish stories that are meaningful to their audiences, which mainstream papers often overlook.

Vourvoulias says that other papers can learn from El Diario, "most English language newspapers have tried to reach out to a very broad suburban middle-class audience, and as a result of that, working-class Americans have been left out of the coverage equation."

Source: On The Media