The Asian Pacific Post - How it wins by reporting on a different beat
Noted & Quoted in: Vancouver Magazine, April 2005
Noted & Quoted by: Tyler Hopson
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Vancouver Magazine: April 2005 |
For instance, federal Conservative party leader Stephen Harper must have thought the Post a perfect match when he launched a cynical media campaign against same-sex marriage in ethnic newspapers across the country this winter, hoping to harvest homophobic voters from "traditionally"-minded Asian communities. The Richmond-based paper ran one of Harper's ads near the front of one issue.
But just two pages prior The Post's editorial team took a hard look at same-sex marriage. The editorial mentioned Harper's ad campaign, but only in passing. The article's major conclusion was that same-sex marriage is a "non-issue" that politicians should put aside.
"From our point of view, same-sex marriage is not really an issue which is relevant to people's day-to-day lives," says Jagdeesh Mann, the paper's managing editor. "It is actually more like a 'smoke and mirrors' kind of issue. It's more about distraction which, I guess, has been magnified by the media."
Same-sex marriage matters at the level of religious and personal freedoms, he continues, "but most people are thinking about business, work, family. They're not thinking about whether their neighbour is having a same-sex marriage. They're not really that concerned."
Harper's campaign, with its explicit focus on ethnic publications, missed the mark. Harper's assumption that ethnic communities would be friendly to the Conservative party defence of "traditional" values demonstrated a deep lack of understanding about the diversity within those communities. You can make that same argument about most of Canada's mainstream newspapers and their attitude towards ethnic communities and readers. In fact, that argument is the very reason papers like The Post exist.
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Illustration by Aaron Leighton (www.aaronleighton.com) |
Fabian Dawson, now deputy editor at The Province newspaper, worked for The South East Asian Post in the mid-1990s. Dawson calls Sewak the "brainchild" behind the paper's success. Sewak came to Canada in the early 1990s with less than $200 to his name. Sewak's father, a mining engineer, is indirectly credited with sparking the young Sewak's enthusiasm for journalism.
"He caught his taste of newspapers basically by hanging around in the colonial clubhouses that his father belonged to," says Dawson. "He's always wanted to start a newspaper."
In 2003 The Post won B.C.'s top journalism prize, a Jack Webster Award for best community reporting. "Our signature is on breaking investigative stories. Each issue we break a story, complemented with a very focused and hard-hitting editorial," says Mann, who pointedly avoids involvement with any political party, interest group, or religious organization. "I think that's why people like the paper, because it doesn't have any hidden agenda," Mann says.
It's difficult to define The Post, even for those most closely connected to it. "We are an Asian newspaper--or better actually, we're a Canadian newspaper that presents Asian news from a Canadian perspective," Mann says pensively. "It means that you have a city that is approximately fifty per cent Asian, possibly more."
If one out of every two people in this city has some Asian background, it seems this little paper is definitely in demand. But what's a Canadian perspective "We're providing news here locally which is relevant to a Vancouver audience and a Canadian audience because Asia is so much a part of Canada now," says Mann.
Dawson also struggles with labeling the paper. He settles on calling The Post a "boutique newspaper."
"It's a curious being," he says. "It is neither a community newspaper because it doesn't focus on one community [or] an ethnic newspaper because it's written in English. They go where they think the story is," he says simply.
Published every second Thursday, The Post claims a readership of 160,000. Only seventy per cent of them are Asian. A press kit for the paper says eighty-eight per cent of readers are between the ages of 21 and 54 and that readers are split evenly in terms of gender.
Mann says the "ethnic" and "mainstream" tags can have a ghettoizing effect on a paper, yet he believes in the need for alternatives to the big daily papers.
"This black and white thinking has put people into one space or another. We are saying we're neither. Yet we're both," he says with an enigmatic smile. "We look at ourselves as being a mainstream Asian newspaper."
Dawson says too often mainstream papers only cover the bizarre events that happen in Asia--elephant stampedes or busloads of people falling down a ravine.
"The Post is not a major competitor of ours. But they make us sit up and think about what we do here at The Province sometimes," he admits.
"To be frank," says Mann, "the mainstream's grip on readership is not penetrating a lot of markets. It's not penetrating new markets."
Dr. Mary Lynn Young, a professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia and columnist for The Globe and Mail, agrees. Young says the only segments of the media now growing are ethnic media and online media.
"Traditional news sources are all facing a decline or--at least--a stall in their audience share."
Young recently wrote a column about Vancouver's upcoming freebie newspaper wars. Sweden-based Metro International is about to launch a Vancouver edition of its daily commuter papers on the city's public transit lines. Metro already has papers in Toronto and Montreal.
CanWest Global Communications is preparing its own Metro equivalent--known as The Dose. Already in control of both of Vancouver's largest daily newspapers, a leading TV station and a major chunk of community papers in the Lower Mainland, it seems CanWest is not to be outdone.
But Young says papers like The Asian Post that target ethnic niche markets may be in a strong position. The new commuter papers will rely largely on rehashed news from other sources, meaning The Post's breaking stories are safe and sound.
No matter how proud Mann may be of the paper's independent status, the lack of corporate financial backing means "flexibility" is a key word around The Post's offices.
"Things are not as settled. We're constantly going through growing pains," he says. "You want to do so much and you know how to do so much but you're always constrained by money."
Both Mann and Dawson remain coy about the paper's financial status. But the Post's upscale office in Richmond's Pacific Business Centre--also home to the Richmond Chamber of Commerce, lawyers and investors--lead one to believe the paper is at least a few issues away from newspaper heaven.
"I can tell you they're doing very good," Dawson says. "Let's put it this way, they're not hurting."
Mann says there is some competition at the paper's margins and that all newspapers compete for advertising dollars. "But in our own bubble, there really isn't another paper like us."
