The LA Times announced this week a new initiative involving three of LA’s largest Asian American news outlets. The Times is now working with The World Journal, The Korea Daily and Nguoi Viet Daily News to make Times original content available in translation.
The move reflects the continued importance that ethnic media outlets play in engaging with diverse audiences and could offer a model for other regions.
“We’re excited about working with these storied publications to make our reporting on a range of relevant topics more accessible to their readers,” Anh B. Do, community engagement editor for the Los Angeles Times, said in a Jan. 17 press release announcing the partnerships.
Do’s father, Yen Do, founded the Nguoi Viet Daily News in 1978 after arriving in Los Angeles as a refugee from Vietnam, famously bringing with him Vietnamese language typeset he used in Saigon before fleeing, which he later used to set up Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese language publication in the US.
Taiwan-based World Journal and the Korea Daily both maintain bureaus in Canada and the US, in major cities including in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Both were also established in the 1970s.
California is a minority-majority state and is home to more foreign-born immigrants than any other state in the country, 34% of them identifying as Asian American, according to the Pew Research Center.
“We feel it is very important to make LA Times content accessible in different languages to better connect to cultural communities,” Do told EMS in an interview, to “increase both of our audiences… and also to provide public service.”
Under the terms of the content licensing agreement, all three news outlets will select one LA Times story per week which they will then translate and publish – both in print and online – in their respective languages. For its part, the LA Times will have the option to also print the translated material online at latimes.com.
The LA Times currently produces content for Spanish-language audiences as well as special projects for other languages spoken across Los Angeles.
Do noted the agreement is the first step in the papers getting to know one another and that as the relationship evolves it could grow to include more and deeper collaborations including joint events.
The news comes on the heels of an announcement from the LA Times Guild, the union representing the paper’s journalists, about the possibility of another round of layoffs at The Times, which is on track to lose between $30-40 million in 2023, according to reporting from the New York Times.
The paper cut about 74 jobs last year. “This is the big one,” read an email from the Guild to employees this week. A one-day work stoppage, the first in LA Times 142 year history, is planned for Friday to protest the anticipated layoffs.
Like its mainstream counterparts, ethnic media outlets have also struggled in recent years amid the rise of social media and other online platforms that have siphoned off critical advertising dollars that were once the mainstay of their business models.
Efforts are now underway to ensure the sustainability of local news through a variety of strategies, including at the policy level where states like California are exploring ways to get big tech companies to pay news outlets for the content they carry.
An innovative approach in Canada diverts such funds to outlets based not on the traffic to their sites but on the number of journalists they maintain on staff as a means of incentivizing newsrooms to invest in local journalism.
“We have many, many shared goals and visions and worries for the growth of our industry,” noted Do. “We need to work together to experiment and to find solutions and, you know, to be more efficient and make it fun.”
She added that the agreement now in place could be replicated in other regions, particularly those with diverse populations. It also comes at a crucial time as the 2024 elections moves into high gear.
“I feel we need to focus on the Asian American vote and the individual community votes, such as in the Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean and Vietnamese communities,” said Do. “They can be swing votes in many places, not just California.”
Ethnic media have often been the first to break important stories involving their communities. Examples include Nguoi Viet’s coverage of the troubling working conditions in Los Angeles’ nail salons, which the New York Times would later go on to cover, as well as reporting by the Richmond Pulse on Laotian phone trees in Richmond, California that proved crucial during vaccination efforts at the height of the Covid 19 pandemic.
“I think we need to have diverse reading choices,” said Do about the importance of maintaining a robust local media sector, both in print and online, something the Times hopes to support with this move.
“It’s like having a menu to choose from at a restaurant. We don’t often go to places that only have one type of dish,” Do explained. “We need variety, we need illumination, we need education, we need entertainment. In some communities, there is even an urgency for activism.”
