2005 Annual Report - Ethnic Media Audience

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, getting hard numbers concerning the audiences of ethnic news outlets is difficult. Many are run by small, locally owned companies, and the populations they serve are often language-specific and small. The 2000 Census, for instance, found there were 11.8 million Asian Americans living in the United States, seemingly enough to spawn a language-based advertising or publication group that might gather data. But when you break that population into its constituent language groups, the numbers don't sound quite so dramatic. The single largest group of Asian Americans in that number was Chinese-Americans with 2.7 million people. Spread across the U.S. and divided into the many dialects of Chinese, the number seems a lot smaller. And an Asian American as counted by the Census may have been here for a year or thirty years, and may have limited English or speak the language as well as or better than the average American. For such reasons, much of the data concerning ethnic-news audiences tend to be anecdotal and scattered.¹

As we noted last year, the one exception to this general rule is the Spanish-language media, which have become a more organized entity as the Spanish-speaking population of the U.S. has risen dramatically in the past twenty years. The fact that so many different nations speak Spanish means immigrants from many different countries look to these media for information - not to mention the fact that one of the nations that borders the U.S. speaks Spanish.

In this section will we look at the audience numbers available - national figures and more anecdotal numbers - but also look at why various ethnicities use ethnic media outlets. We will examine which media ethnic populations say they turn to for different kinds of news and when and how often they say they turn to English-language outlets.

As other media see audience declines, the ethnic media appear to be bucking the trend. Even though hard figures are elusive, it seems clear from available data and trends that the numbers here are growing.