[lg policy] New York: Liu Courts the Press in Many Languages

[Harold Schiffman]

December 23, 2009, 10:22 am

Liu Courts the Press in Many Languages
By EWA KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA


When John C. Liu, the city’s comptroller-elect, dropped in earlier
this month at the Ippies Awards, which honor the work of the city’s
ethnic journalists, he may as well have been at his own party. There
was no end to all the hand shaking with the 100 or so immigrant
reporters, the posing for photos, the countless interviews. “He has
already won, but he still comes to see us,” said Ari Kagan, a reporter
with Vecherniy New York, a Russian-language weekly, who met Mr. Liu
about five years ago during an event in the Russian community. A
politician shaking hands at a gathering of reporters? That is hardly
news. But these are ethnic journalists, who find they get far less
attention than their mainstream media competitors, often feeling like
second-class citizens — except when Mr. Liu is involved. He has
aggressively courted immigrant journalists ever since he was elected
to the City Council in 2001.

These days, dozens of reporters have his private cellphone number.
Plenty of them were at his victory party in November, when he became
the first Asian-American to be elected comptroller. And he knows their
names, even though some of them may be difficult to pronounce because
they come from all over the world. “He always returns our e-mails and
phone calls,” Mr. Kagan added. Immigrants constitute more than 36
percent of the city’s population, and Mr. Liu said he saw a clear
opportunity here. “Growing up in New York City and watching the
communities that I represent in the City Council, I realized most
people are not reading ‘the non-ethnic newspapers,’ ” he said. “If you
look around Flushing, if you look on the subway, if you look at local
coffee shops, or even at the litter on the street, there is all
different kinds of newspapers that you see,” Mr. Liu added.

Interestingly, and perhaps a bit counterintuitively, Mr. Liu said he
did not actually like the term ethnic, calling it “marginalizing.”
“News organizations are news organizations,” he said, “whether they
publish and broadcast in English or not.”  According to the latest
census data, about 3.7 million New Yorkers 5 years old and older —
47.8 percent — speak a language other than English at home. Though it
is hard to pin down exact numbers, roughly 300 foreign-language
newspapers and magazines in more than 50 languages cater to their
needs. Mr. Liu received no endorsements from the mainstream media.
Reaching out to often-overlooked newsrooms turned out to be a good
strategy. “The ethnic press gives local candidates a great opportunity
to get exposure, to get known and to get attention,” said Mitchell L.
Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York
University’s Wagner Graduate Schools of Public Service. “Another
benefit is that often ethnic papers are weekly, so you get the whole
seven days to absorb everything in that paper. They just don’t get
tossed out.”

“Mayor Bloomberg also put a lot of attention to that,” Professor Moss
said. While campaigning, Mr. Liu visited about 50 ethnic and community
newspapers to present his policies. One issue he raised again and
again was expanding economic opportunity to immigrants. “We should
make sure that the smaller and the new upcoming businesses, often run
by immigrants, have a chance at the economic pie,” he said during a
visit to Nowy Dziennik, a Polish-language daily. He also cited his
record as a city councilman when he fought for better access to
translation services and against bias crimes. He talked about his
immigrant roots and how his father, Chang F. Liu, admired the Kennedys
so much that he changed his own name to Joseph and his sons’ to John,
Robert and Edward. John C. Liu’s original name was Chun.

His parents still read The World Journal, one of four Chinese-language
dailies published in New York. His mother-in-law reads another, Sing
Tao Daily. Mr. Liu, 42, who came to the United States from Taiwan when
he was 5, says he is not able to read Chinese-language papers. He
likes, however, to browse through El Diario La Prensa, one of the
largest Spanish-language newspapers in New York. “In New York City
public schools, I had several years of Spanish and no instructions in
Chinese.”  But it was Chinese-language newspapers that provided nearly
daily coverage of his campaign and were instrumental in explaining the
election process to their readers. “For example, a lot of people
didn’t know what runoff was; we spent a lot of time writing about it,”
said Lotus Chau, the chief reporter at Sing Tao Daily. “The community
was very excited about his candidacy. And they went to vote.”

For many ethnic papers, Mr. Liu’s attention brought another benefit.
“For the first time somebody running for the comptroller’s office
advertised in our newspaper,” said Mohsin Zaheer of Sada-E-Pakistan,
published in Brooklyn. “But it was his outreach to the Pakistani
community that really amazed us. He came twice to our office and then
whenever someone from the community called him and invited him for an
event, he was there.”

Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska is a reporter for Nowy Dziennik, The Polish Daily News.



http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/liu-courts-the-press-in-many-languages/
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