6 The Hampton Roads Messenger


Volume 7 Number 12


Seattle Directs Contractors to Advertise in Ethnic Media


BY ASHA DUMONTHIER Seattle may be the first in the


nation to require its contractors to include ethnic media in their community outreach plans, city officials say. The move boosts the visibility of ethnic media, but some of those news outlets say it is unclear if it will result in more ad dollars.


Mayor Mike McGinn announced


the policy change last month, which calls for consultants proposing city-funded projects with a community outreach component to incorporate ethnic media in their outreach and advertising plans.


Robert Cruickshank, senior


advisor to the mayor, said the policy ensures that city-funded projects such as building initiatives, public health campaigns and community projects, will be publicized in ethnic media.


“We want to reach the people


we serve,” he said. “If there’s a new building for example, we want everyone in that neighborhood to know about it.”


Cruickshank called the new policy


a “sensible” move for the city, adding that it has made strides to reach a growing population of immigrants, many of whom rely on non-English publications for their news. About a third of the city’s residents are minorities, with Asians making up 13.8 percent and Hispanics making up 6.6 percent.


Martha Montoya, publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper El Mundo said the move is groundbreaking and validates the role ethnic media play to inform their communities.


“I’ve never seen a mayor do this,”


she said, adding that ethnic residents in the city turn to ethnic news outlets rather than mainstream news sources such as The Seattle Times to stay in the know.


“People go to the content they feel comfortable with,” Montoya said.


Cruickshank says the mayor’s


office first proactively reached out to local ethnic media to publicize the 2010 Census.


Since then, he says, ethnic media


outlets such as Runta, Northwest Vietnamese News, Northwest Asian Weekly, and Univision have met on a regular basis with the mayor’s office to discuss ways that the city could better support ethnic media as key news outlets as well as small businesses. The media representatives expressed frustration over being overlooked by city consultants in the past. They said they wanted more information about plans and projects that might affect ethnic populations.


Charles Lam, editor of Northwest Asian Weekly, said city officials


caused an uproar in recent years among residents of South Seattle -- an area predominantly of people of color – because city contractors failed to hire local workers in a series of redevelopment projects, including the renovation of the Rainier Beach Community Center in 2011.


“It’s caused a lot of stink,” Lam


said. “This is a case where it would have been nice to be involved and know before rather than after.”


Muhamod Yussuf, editor of


Runta, a Seattle-based bilingual Somali and English newspaper, says that communications between the mayor’s office and his newspaper have improved over the past three years.


“They know what we do and the


importance of ethnic media,” he said. However, city consultants who are not based in the mayor’s office have not been required to share the mayor’s values. Now consultants will be required to translate their news releases into relevant languages and budget for ethnic media ads, if necessary.


Some ethnic media say the


mayor’s policy is an important step, but won’t boost the bottom lines of most ethnic media outlets. Julie Pham, co-owner of Northwest Vietnamese News says, “It is really good that the city is doing this. But the difficult thing is that the pie is still small.”


City officials say that it would be


“impossible” to quantify how much the city as a whole spends on media advertising, because each department comes up with its own budget for community outreach. As such it is difficult to estimate the financial impact the new policy may have, if any, on ethnic media.


Some ethnic media publishers say


they question whether this latest move by the mayor is largely symbolic, and one intended to gain votes from Seattle’s ethnic communities, ahead of a hotly-contested mayor’s race in which three challengers are hoping to make it past the Aug. 6 primary.


However, Montoya, the El Mundo


publisher, points out that the mayor’s proposal may indirectly have a positive financial effect on media outlets simply by putting ethnic media on the public radar. She says she hopes that if the mayor’s office continues to advocate for these news outlets, ethnic media will begin to get more advertising dollars from larger companies.


Despite the policy’s uncertain


financial significance, it will help ethnic media stay on top of important local news.


As Magdaleno Rose-Avila,


Director of the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs says, for him the meaning of the mayor’s new policy is clear: “It’s just a matter of respect.”


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August 2013 The Old Lessons of Detroit


Downtown Detroit, once a vibrant hub of urban America, now represents for many its collapse as the city filed for bankruptcy on July 18, 2013. Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images


BY IMARA JONES Just days ago Detroit, arguably


America’s most distressed urban area, made the largest declaration of insolvency by any U.S. municipality ever. Given the city’s unique role in American economic and cultural history, many people—from national leaders to concerned citizens—have wondered whether its predicament portends anything larger for the nation as a whole. The answer: It likely does not.


The truth is that the challenges


faced by Detroit have been common to the majority of America’s biggest cities for the last five decades. Distressingly, though not surprisingly, they just happened to join together with a unique and dogged fury in America’s motor city, and the citizens there are paying the price.


Rather than focus on esoteric


questions of what Detroit’s bankruptcy means for bondholders on Wall Street, urgent energy needs to be devoted to the 700,000 mostly black, mostly poor Americans who remain there with nowhere else to go. This includes the 21,000 city pensioners who receive $19,000 as part of a contract they made with the city decades ago.


Frighteningly, the local economy


has cratered to such an extent that less than a million people are left in a city designed to hold three times that many residents. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit has a poverty rate three times the national average with close to six out of 10 children living in poverty. It takes the Detroit police over an hour to answer a 911 call, one out of three of the city’s ambulances are inoperative, and four out of 10 street lights don’t work. Detroit is clearly a city flat on its back.


These facts underscore that


the scale of Detroit’s fiscal woes is breathtaking. The city owes 100,000 creditors over $18.5 billion. In the past five years alone it’s wracked up half-a-billion dollars in additional debt.


The core issue is that there’s


simply not enough people nor economic activity to make the city’s debt payments and satisfy its needs. Detroit’s population is two-thirds smaller than at its height 60 years ago. And it needs more government than


it can pay for. Given the desperate situation, Steve Rattner, who orchestrated the government bailout of the entire auto industry in 2009, has called for a bailout of Detroit’s residents.


Though we are all faced with


Detroit’s pressing emergency, the truth is that the city didn’t land here overnight.


Through a combination of an


over-reliance on a single, formerly all-powerful industry and two generations of unsteady political leadership, Detroit remained stuck and resistant to change. The Washington Post’s Keith Richburg, a Detroit-native, said that the city was “kept alive by pride, a nostalgia for its former glory, and an illusion that revival was just around the corner.”


The essential problem is that


Detroit has remained the capital of an industry which built America but is now a shadow of its former self: the car industry. And nothing in the city has shown up to replace it. That’s because automobiles were so dominant for so long that they crowded out the city’s economic imagination.


Let’s take a brief step back to see


how. Before the car, the U.S. was a nation of small towns and agriculture. But after the introduction of the mass produced automobile by Detroit’s Ford, General Motors and eventually Chrysler, the nation quickly became the world’s biggest economy.


Detroit’s rise followed suit. For those who’ve grown up with


the American car industry in constant crisis, it’s hard to imagine a time when automobiles were the most important and valuable item that America made. However that time wasn’t all that long ago. From 1913 until almost 1970, Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the United States.


The U.S. economy, the car


industry and the city of Detroit all moved in tandem for a while. Led by the manufacture of automobiles, during the 1950s, half of all economic activity in the world occurred in the United States. During that time, Ford, GM and Chrysler made eight out of 10 cars produced on the planet. The American economic and car industry boom fueled Motown’s ascent to the position of country’s third largest city,


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