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Sale of Viet Mercury Troubles Bay Area Vietnamese
The sale of a newsweekly once deemed a promising partnership between
mainstream media and an ethnic community could leave Vietnamese in
Silicon Valley without an important news source. Some community members
believe money from Vietnam is behind the sale.
By Andrew Lam, New America Media
SAN FRANCISCO - Oct 26, 2005 - Unlike some ethnic enclaves, the
Vietnamese-American community in Santa Clara county, Calif., does not
lack for news in its own language. If anything, the community can access
more news than a mainstream population reading in English only.
Three Vietnamese daily newspapers, half a dozen weeklies and several
monthly magazines cater to a Vietnamese-American population of 125,000,
not to mention radio and television programs and an array of Web sites.
The largest of the weeklies, Viet Mercury, was owned by the San Jose
Mercury News, which has a bureau in Hanoi and shared its content with
its English daily, adding a wealth of original information, in a
non-advocacy role, into the mix.
As one longtime Vietnamese reader in San Jose put it recently, "You read
the Viet Merc and the San Jose Mercury News for information. You read
community papers to know where the community stands on the issues and
when to protest."
That unique mix of editorial missions may be ending, however, as the San
Jose Mercury News recently sold its Vietnamese-language weekly. Viet
Mercury has reportedly been bought by Jim Nguyen, a former sales
employee of the weekly who now heads a group of Vietnamese-American
businessmen. Its last issue will be Nov. 11.
In an Oct. 21 press release announcing the sale, San Jose Mercury News
Publisher George Riggs said that "buyers from the Vietnamese community"
will "continue to serve the Vietnamese-reading community with the
No.1-read publication in that language." The Mercury News simultaneously
announced the closure of its nine-year-old Spanish weekly Nuevo Mundo.
Publishing since 1999, Viet Mercury was distributed free and had a
circulation of 35,000. It began with great promises in the heyday of
dot-com money, and was in the eyes of many media observers a new kind of
marriage between mainstream and ethnic press -- one perceived to be
lucrative, and a trend.
Back then it made sense. The majority of the Vietnamese-Americans in
Silicon Valley are still first-generation immigrants. Though most are
functional English speakers, many prefer to read in their own language.
Many also have achieved financial success, owning real estate and small
businesses.
"Santa Clara county's Vietnamese community is a major market, with an
estimated buying power of 1.8 billion," wrote the Mercury News in 1999
as it launched the Viet Mercury. "Growing in size and buying power, this
is a valuable audience for any advertiser."
That was before dot-com failures and before 9/11. After the high-tech
bubble burst and the economy swooned, advertising revenue plummeted.
Competition among ethnic media grew fiercer. While other
Vietnamese-language newspapers were operating on the cheap, often out of
small offices and with part-time employees, Viet Mercury had a large
staff under high union rates. With those high production costs, it lost
money.
Yet the weekly arguably had much higher professional standards than
others in its field. One case in point was the story of Bich Cau Thi
Tran, a Vietnamese woman shot dead in her own kitchen by a San Jose
policeman on July 13, 2003, as she held a vegetable peeler that
resembled a knife. From July 14, 2003, to August 30, 2003, the Mercury
News ran 29 stories on the incident, and Viet Mercury published 16. Cali
Today, a five-times-a-week paper, produced 12. Seven different reporters
covered the Tran case for both the Mercury News and the Viet Mercury,
three of whom were Vietnamese-Americans. None of the Vietnamese-owned
papers could match such firepower and professional standards.
But such an operation became unsustainable when the economy worsened.
"With Americans, commerce is No. 1," Nam Nguyen, editor and publisher of
Cali Today, whose Vietnamese readership spans the Bay Area as well
Sacramento, recently told the Orange County-based Nguoi Viet newspaper.
"But with Vietnamese, even if you operate at a loss, you still try to
run the paper because your community still needs a voice."
In a sea of community-based newspapers, however, the Viet Mercury's
voice was unique, defining its role as providing "objective"
information. It tended to cover stories "down the middle," as De Tran,
soon-to-be former publisher of the Viet Mercury, once explained. It left
the role of advocacy to others.
Nguyen Qui Duc, host of "Pacific Time," a syndicated weekly radio
program on KQED in San Francisco, says he hopes the new owners of the
Viet Mercury will maintain the objectivity and balanced reporting that
the original owners cultivated. The new paper "can be an advocate of the
community -- which is the normal role of newspapers in ethnic or
minority communities -- but it need not abandon quality or fall into the
trap of running only articles that don't raise eyebrows," Duc says. The
Vietnamese community, he says, has matured and will not support anything
less.
Quynh Thi, executive editor of Vietnam Daily in San Jose, said that when
Viet Mercury first launched she worried about competition, but soon
found it operated in a different universe. "We're a daily, they're a
weekly. Our advertisers are also different, more community-based. Many
of the Viet Merc's are big corporations."
But she added that the community is very curious about the sale. "What
everyone is talking about now is who are these investors? No one seems
to have come forward," she says.
One Vietnamese journalist in San Jose who would only speak anonymously
repeated a growing rumor in the community: that "money from Vietnam is
behind the sale." In recent years, various Vietnamese citizens have
bought businesses and real estate in California. Jim Nguyen, the
journalist noted, had a hand in bringing San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh
together as sister cities a few years back. Could he have brought
Vietnamese money to the United States to buy media as well?
As of this writing, Jim Nguyen has agreed to a later interview to
respond to all the rumors. The community, in the meantime, is watching
closely the evolution of the weekly.
Other Recent Readings of Interest
Lam is author of "Perfume
Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," forthcoming in
October from Heyday Books |
