AsianWeek Stops Printing: Good Riddance!

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).