In these trying times for mainstream media, which Chicago journalists have the most to say to one another but are least likely to say it? My nominees would be the publishers of the region’s ethnic press. Most run shoestring operations, serving readers of modest means who share a common experience as strangers in a strange land yet are divided by such profound partitions as religion, history, neighborhood, and language.
It was held last October 27 in Doppelt’s classroom. Journalists from half a dozen papers and one independent Web site met not only Doppelt’s 11 students but one another. Until that meeting, “I wasn’t aware that there was a Korean publication in Chicago,” says Silvana Tabares, managing editor of the bilingual Latino weekly Extra.
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Franklin and Doppelt’s idea was to divvy the students up among the six papers and have them write stories sharing a common theme. Health care was one they kicked around, foreclosures another. But immigration was the compelling experience everyone’s readers shared, and when the journalists looked for a more specific focus, they landed on the census.
Zoe Jennings in Pinoy: “Many Filipinos may not understand the importance of the count because in the Philippines, there is no census equivalent and they had never been counted. In providing the government with their name and family information, Clarito says, many Filipinos fear that the government is keeping tabs on them, or at the very least, will demand they perform jury duty or another civic duty.”
“In the best of all worlds,” Franklin allowed, the stories on the census would have been staff written. “But most of these papers are very small-staffed. We gave them an extra boost. . . . And for the students it was an eye-opening experience.”
“It’s a cool idea,” says Doppelt.
“Why would a Polish newspaper publish an Indian story?” wonders Lakshmana Rao, editor of the India Tribune. In other words, why would he publish a Polish story? He won’t. What he will do, he tells me, is carry a sidebar summarizing the common concerns reported in the other five stories. Mariano Santos, editor and publisher of Pinoy, says he was going through the other stories looking for quotes “here and there” that might flesh out his paper’s 2,600-word article (the longest of the six). Santos is ready to repeat the process: “Working together gives us a kind of unified purpose,” he says. But printing the other articles “would be, so to speak, a waste of space,” even online, where space is for the wasting.
