KEY POINTS:
Eight years ago, when ethnic newspapers and magazines started sprouting all over New Zealand, a businessman friend who wanted to migrate here asked if he too should jump on the bandwagon.
As a regular visitor he felt New Zealand papers reported news mainly from a white person's perspective, and thought there was a market for community newspapers catering for our growing immigrant and ethnic communities.
He wasn't talking about the type of free ethnic papers you pick up at grocery shops, but real newspapers, run by trained professionals that could give mainstream community newspapers a run for their money.
I told him there was indeed a market and huge potential, but advised him against putting his money into such a venture.
I argued that mainstream newspaper publishers would soon catch on to New Zealand's growing diversity and launch their own targeted ethnic publications too, or at least increase the diversity of their newsrooms for better coverage in the new communities. It just did not make any sense if they didn't.
"They are not blind," I told my friend after reading his proposal. "You see New Zealand changing, so do they. You see a big market in the ethnic communities, they see the same, and are probably working on something even as we speak."
I was a new migrant at that time, and as a former employee of Singapore publishing giant Singapore Press Holdings, I had seen how fast the company moved each time they identified a new segment of readers. They launched a variety of newspapers and magazines in all of the country's main languages including Malay, Indian and Chinese. I thought it would be the same with the mainstream publishers here.
I was wrong.
Eight years on, and even with two eye-opening revelations of New Zealand's increasing diversity in 2001 and 2006 since that meeting with my friend, mainstream media publishers have continued to show little interest in the ethnic readers or the ethnic market.
The latest Census shows Auckland today is made up of 43.4 per cent non-Europeans - Asian, Pacific Island or Maori people. But this is a fact that many within the media would rather not want to know, or face up to.
Last week, when Television New Zealand chief executive Rick Ellis told a parliamentary committee that Police Ten-7, Shortland Street and Game of Two Halves met charter requirements because they offered a Maori presence, we all knew how ridiculous his statement was.
As MP Dr Pita Sharples rightly pointed out in his Radio New Zealand interview, saying "Kia ora, bro" and having one or two Maori in a particular programme did not make it Maori TV.
But what Ellis said made me wonder if other mainstream media bosses also see their ethnic minority viewers and readers in the same light.
With no charter requirements to meet, are there some who think that having a few coloured faces here and there is sufficient to meet the needs of their increasingly diverse audience?
These may be the same people who wonder why circulation, viewer numbers and advertising revenues continue to fall.
Two weeks ago, the New Zealand Journalists' Training Organisation (NZJTO) ran a forum in Wellington on ethnic-diversity issues facing New Zealand newsrooms. No one from any of New Zealand's main news dailies attended. An American expert on ethnic diversity reporting, Professor Arlene Morgan, spoke at the forum, and drew parallels between New Zealand and the United States. She said understanding and serving diverse communities would become essential to the success and survival of news organisations in the future.
Short of publishing newspapers in the ethnic scripts of these communities, she said it was essential for media to start recruiting minority journalists in newsrooms.
I fully agreed with Professor Morgan, when she said in her TV One interview: "I think it is important to try to recruit people of colour into the business because they bring a tone and perspective, and an expression to the newsroom and to the decision making, that you're not going to get if you're an all-white newsroom."
In a book Professor Morgan edited called The Authentic Voice, there was a story about how Allie Shah, a Muslim woman reporter for the Star Tribune, wrote a story on Somali girls' coming of age and their struggle to keep their culture in the US. Shah first drew on her religious background and ethnicity to gain the trust of the girls' parents.
Reading Shah's story, I thought it would have been near impossible for a newspaper with an all-white newsroom like most in New Zealand to have even tackled such a story.
The ethnic market is big and it is growing, as the Census has revealed.
Any mainstream media ignoring this market will soon not be so mainstream any more.
