8 Asians

AsianWeek Stops Printing: Good Riddance!

By Efren | Thursday, January 1, 2009 | Comments


The San Francisco Chronicle recently announced that AsianWeek, one of the longest running publications for Asian Americans that is based in San Francisco, will no longer have print issues and go completely online, with its last issue being printed Friday, January 2.  The official reason is due to “economic realities” and that Asian Americans are more apt to use alternative media.

I started reading AsianWeek about 15 years ago when I was in college, and found out that  many of the articles were written by friends at UC Berkeley, and that they often had free rein to write whatever they wanted, with little real editing happening.  That slowly turned me off to reading AsianWeek, particularly when it wrote about LGBT issues, when the writing usually became salacious and based more on the writer’s personal opinions and less on the reality of queer Asian Americans.

The final straw came when Kenneth Eng, a weekly column writer for AsianWeek, wrote an article in 2007 called, “Why I Hate Blacks,” causing an immediate uproar from other Asian Americans calling for the removal of the then editor-in-chief, Samson Wong, who was discovered to have approved of the article without ever reading it.  This also caused an immediate response from the City of San Francisco, who withdrew all ads in protest, with many other businesses quickly following suit.  Although Samson Wong and AsianWeek ended up apologizing for this soon after, the damage was done, and AsianWeek soon became nothing more than a bunch of ads, weekly news articles pulled from Yahoo and other news sources, and random articles from high school and junior high school students too young and naive to know the history of the newspaper.

Although I am not  sad that AsianWeek is gone, the fact that it remained one of the better Asian American newspapers out there is sad testimony to the poor quality of most of the English language Asian American newspapers out there, many of which conflate Asian to mean only one ethnicity (as with many Filipino American newspapers that claim to be the Asian voice even though they only talk about Filipino American issues), or are little more than society/gossip rags.

I only hope AsianWeek gets to improve their quality by being completely online and actually start editing what they publish, like other Asian American “alternative media”.  (like us, of course).

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  • CaliStunna818
    How many Filipino newspapers/media claim to be the Asian voice?

    The only one I know is Asianjournal.com

    If that's true...the irony is even funnier! Filipino-American newspapers claim to be the "ASIAN" voice, yet Filipino-Americans also claim "We're not Asian, we're Pacific Islander".

    LoL
  • Darth Velocity
    I was working at AsianWeek at the time of the Kenneth Eng debacle, and while I had no direct say in editorial decisions, there were many of us who did not want that printed. Personally, I'd disregarded him as a crazycake with a cherry on top early on and never really thought "Why I Hate Blacks" would really make it into print. I knew eventually this HUGE misstep (or, really, several small-to-medium-sized missteps) would factor into its downfall, but I didn't realize it would happen only a little over a year later.
  • I actually stopped reading most Filipino newspapers, since a number of them, like Asian Journal, claimed to be the "Asian voice". It sounds like most of them have closed down, which is just as well since the editing was so bad it was really painful to read (literally, as when I read an article that was written about me and my partner after we got married which had so many grammatical and spelling errors that I got a really bad headache trying to decipher it).

    I'll read the Asian American regional newspapers when I read them, like in LA and Seattle, and most of them seem very insular and gossip-related, rather than talking about issues that are pertinent to the community.
  • Would a white-people owned newspaper be subject to the same bar of scrutiny by Asian American bloggers?
  • William: Depends. Would it be an Asian themed newspaper? I mean, I would personally. If Ziff-Davis made an Asian magazine (please, not that they ever WOULD) it's still one thing at the end of the day; whether or not the content from cover to cover is solid.

    For me personally, AsianWeek was just a paper I saw at the newstands at the Glen Park BART station; nothing in particular really spoke to me one way or another. And being apathetic about a newspaper is the best way for it to not get a lot of readership.

    That said; it's sad that newspapers have to go to gossip related stuff to generate readership, but it totally works. I'm at JFK airport right now and flipping through some of this New York Post stuff, it's totally like a local printed "Inside Edition," but I can understand why there are readers.
  • Ernie,

    Did you hit up times square in the freezing cold to watch the ball in Times Square? Well, hope you had a nice stay.

    -William
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