If the audience for the ethnic media is massive, is there also massive potential for economic gain? The data suggest that the answer is both yes and no. Different ethnicities often mean different languages, which often means fragmented audiences. While it is true that news organizations and their economics have often been defined by local markets, they do need some sort of critical mass, a certain amount of geographic concentration.

Until 2005, the Spanish-language media provided the only real exception to that rule because of their audience’s common language. Spanish-speakers from Cuba in Florida, or from Puerto Rico in New York, or from Mexico in Texas and California can all watch Univision or Telemundo. Print circulations can be aggregated and ads can be sold on a national scale.

But 2005 witnessed something new: the cable company Comcast took a step toward nationalizing the Asian-American media market. In January, the company announced it was going to “rebrand and reprogram” its International Channel Networks, a collection of channels devoted to programming in different languages. It would now focus just on Asian-Americans under a new name AZN Television.

The station is a hybrid native-language outlet. It offers programming for a pan-Asian audience in English that is aimed in particular at the young — “prime time programming in English, you know your language,” says one advertisement. But it also offers films and TV shows in Manadarin, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Korean and Vietnamese.

That a company with the national reach of Comcast has created an “Asian programming” channel suggests that the mainstream media companies are beginning to recognize the broader ethnic market as one they want to tap. But the effort has already run into some problems. In late 2005, Comcast announced it was restructuring the network and cutting its staff by about 30, roughly half.1 [1] Still, AZN is a move with potentially large implications for the future of ethnic media ownership (more on that later in this section).

The financial potential, however, still trails far behind the Spanish-language outlets. AZN is an experiment that exists only on cable and through one provider. The Spanish-language media are the most mature ethnic sector today and the only one that offers any kind of real, nationalized financial data.