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The Ethnic & Immigrant Media Project of the Rutgers Journalism
Resources Institute is a new initiative started in the spring
of 2003. Its goal is to extend to the ethnic media JRI’s
long-standing mission of providing research and resources
to help individual journalists and news organizations do a
better job of informing the public about matters of importance
in a democracy.
The project is a response to the rapid growth of ethnic and
immigrant media in the New York-New Jersey region over the
last decade. (New York City has seven daily newspapers published
in Chinese. The 6 o’clock local news broadcast with
the largest audience is in Spanish. A radio station in Metuchen
broadcasts South Asian news and music 24 hours a day.)
Ethnic media plays a vital role in creating community for
its audiences and in providing a bridge to the region’s
majority culture, economy and political system, yet it too
often operates in isolation, outside the mainstream journalism
community and bypassed by large advertisers.
New California
Media, a non-profit group started in San Francisco in
1995, and the Independent
Press Association’s New York project, started in
New York City in 1998, are two foundation-supported efforts
to assist the ethnic and immigrant media. Both have made impressive
progress in raising the visibility of the ethnic media and
developing programs to assist their development.
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Ethnic Media Leadership Roundtable was held at Rutgers
on July 15, 2003, drawing more than a dozen editors and
top executives from a number of ethnic media outlets in
New York and New Jersey. |
JRI’s Ethnic Media Project has as its aim to build
on those successes while bringing the unique resources of
Rutgers University to the enterprise. (Among those resources
are the university’s journalistic, market and communications
research capabilities, its diverse student body, many looking
for internship opportunities, and its numerous specialized
centers of ethnic and language studies.) In addition, as the
state university, it will focus needed attention on the growing
portion of the region’s ethnic media that is based in
New Jersey.
The Ethnic Media Project’s first initiative was to
hold an Ethnic Media Leadership Roundtable at Rutgers on July
15, 2003. The half-day session, which included lunch, gathered
more than a dozen editors and top executives from a variety
of ethnic media outlets in New York and New Jersey to talk
about their needs and about Rutgers might help. A Rutgers
honors student, Kathryn Mogol, presented her research into
the ethnic media’s use of online media and Abby Scher,
executive director of the Independent Press Association –
New York, was invited to speak about her efforts in New York
City.
JRI plans to use the results of the roundtable discussion
and a subsequent survey questionnaire based on the discussion,
as well as conversations with IPA-NY, to produce a prioritized
list of projects that would best apply the university’s
resources to the issues of greatest concern to ethnic media
leaders. From that list, it will fashion several specific
project proposals for which it plans to seek funding from
outside sources.
One likely proposal will involve developing an attractive
internship program that can give journalism, marketing and
other SCILS students opportunities to earn academic credit,
and perhaps scholarship aid, by working in ethnic media organizations.
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