2005 Annual Report - Ethnic Media Content Analysis

The many languages and outlets of the ethnic press make it difficult to examine content, perhaps the most critical factor in understanding media impact on its users and on the culture at large. What is the picture presented in the many outlets of the ethnic press? How does it differ from the mainstream press?

The Project decided to try to address ethnic press content by peeling away a small sample of newspapers to translate (where necessary) and study. We looked at five newspapers available in New York City aimed at different ethnicities and races. We chose two papers targeted at immigrants from the other side of the globe - the Pakistan Post (in Urdu) and Sing Tao (in Chinese). We also looked at two large Spanish-language dailies - Hoy and El Diario/La Prensa. And we examined the coverage of the African American community's "newspaper of record," the Amsterdam News. The Independent Press Association of New York, which monitors and analyzes the New York ethnic press, helped the Project select the papers and (when needed) translate them.

For each paper we captured the front-page stories on the same dates we examined the coverage of the mainstream press. For non-dailies we took the front pages of the nearest weeks and for the Pakistan Post, which is a weekly but sometimes ran as many as 20 stories on the front page, we took the stories that ran above the fold.

We coded the headlines and the first few paragraphs of front-page stories by looking at two main variables: the geographic focus of each piece and the topic. "Geographic focus" dealt with the trigger of the story - local, national (i.e., U.S.), international or homeland issues. "Topic" dealt with what the story was about, along the lines of the topic category we used to analyze the mainstream press but with one difference. Pieces strictly about homeland topics (homeland politics and policy) were given a special topic category.

What did we find? For one, there were vast differences between the papers both in geographic focus and in topic. In addition the papers, some broadsheets and some tabloids, had very different front pages that contained vastly different numbers of stories. But there was one general rule in the five papers we looked at: the closer geographically a paper's readers were to their countries of origin, the more the paper was likely to resemble mainstream U.S. papers in content. Those papers aimed at immigrants from distant locations - the Pakistan Post and Sing Tao - tended to focus more on those homelands and less on local New York City news or U.S. national news. The two Spanish-language papers tended to serve their readerships as a kind of alternative to the English-language daily papers. Their front pages covered a wider range of topics and focused largely on U.S. national and local news, while doing stories on the many different homelands of their readers less of the time, or on the inside pages. The Amsterdam News, the only English-language paper we looked at, was heavily local in its content.

Beyond this general finding, the character of each paper is worth exploring individually.