@Julie Well said.

@Marisa I agree… that’s why I included the El Tecolote portion. There is a long history here and you can get a sample from the project Voices for Justice.

What’s the URL of your site? How has the community reacted to the site?

@Kim My thoughts exactly! Um, was that paper owned by Gannett? Ugh.

The real struggle, in my opinion, is to keep msm from dismissing niche news sites as not real journalism or not worthy of being seen/listed as a news source. The bottom line is that we niche news sites are providing a service to our communities that msm elected not to do in the name of their target audiences and major advertisers.

I grew up Asian in a decent-sized Midwestern town. My family was actually featured in the newspaper after my parents reunited following the Vietnam War. But otherwise, did the paper ever cover the Asian community outside of Chinese New Year or other “ethnic” holidays? Not really.

However, I did have the choice of reading a Vietnamese newspaper, Web site, etc. Do I read those? No.

It’s a question of coverage. Do you cover minorities like they are something special? Outside of the norm? That’s the wrong kind of coverage. Do you cover them equally like they are everyone else? Their problems may be slightly different, but the difference is covering them as “minority” problems versus “human” problems.

I once interned at a paper that required that any and every story have a diverse source in it. In Iowa, writing about farmers, we were required to call the a prominent black businessman who knew nothing about farming and get his opinion. Wrong kind of coverage.

So I think of it this way, for some communities, the newspaper has to die, and rise again in a form that actually understands that we are part of the community, not a separate community.