nwasianweekly.com
Sept. 1,
2007
Photo by Ann-Marie Stillion
Every week is like a battle for Assunta Ng, the publisher of the Northwest
Asian Weekly and Seattle Chinese Post for the past 25 years.
Still
alive after thousands of hard battles
By Assunta Ng
Northwest Asian Weekly
Editor’s note: This is part 12 in a continuing series by the publisher of the Northwest Asian Weekly and Seattle Chinese Post. The newspapers are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year.
What is the question I hate to hear yet people love to ask throughout my 25-year publishing career?
Here we go …
“Where do you see yourself five years from now?” is no different from “What will your benchmark be in 10 years?” or “What are your goals five years from now?”
If I were
being playful with my media colleagues, I would reply, “No
comment,” a phrase reporters hate to hear.
“I don’t know” is my honest answer, but very few people
believe me.
“You don’t have long-term goals?” Seattle business owner and “fun specialist” Jolene Jang asked in disbelief recently. “But you are successful!”
My goal has never been to achieve success in the material sense. What matters most is knowing our work is significant in the community.
I’m not trying to be ambiguous or secretive about my future plans. Honestly, I don’t have any!
I have to admit that I am not a visionary who charts her course far down the road. As a small business owner who is driven to publish two good newspapers every week, my duties entail fighting for great stories, ads and readers in every issue. It is as simple as that. I don’t have any hidden grand ambition. What I am deeply against is growing for growing’s sake! If improving the look of the papers translates only into slim profit margins, then forget it. The reason is, our margin is already very small. Naturally, I resisted for years to print our newspapers in full color. I wanted the price to be affordable, customer demand to be huge and technology easy enough for our staff to master.
It might be shocking to you that when I started the newspapers 25 years ago, I didn’t even have a business plan. How did I endure all these years without a plan?
Fear vs. shame
Most of my friends describe me as fearless because I go after what I want. If you are familiar with Asian culture, you know the appropriate word isn’t “fearless”; it’s “shameless.”
Nine out of 10 of my Asian friends don’t share their life dreams with outsiders for one important reason: the shame that could befall on them and their families if they fail. The Asian culture pressures Asian Americans to keep quiet about our goals until we are absolutely ready to act or we have fulfilled our mission.
But Assunta’s approach is to launch right in. I told everybody about my newspaper idea soon after the project came to mind. I wasn’t concerned about what people might think of me. If shamelessness equals determination, then I am all for it. My boldness disturbed some immigrants, but it resulted in applause from American-born Asians, even if they could not read a word in my first newspaper, the Chinese-language Seattle Chinese Post.
A male immigrant once pulled me aside and asked, “Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if in the end you have no newspapers to show?” Some would be insulted by the question. At the time, I was calm and showed no sign of indignation. My silence did not mean I agreed with his words, though. His attitude puzzled me because I thought he was supportive of me all along. In retrospect, he was. He was trying to help me save face, just in case I failed before the community.
But American-born Chinese William Wong, author of “Yellow Journalist,” had a different take on my newspaper journey. He said I had “a lot of courage.”
When I was growing up in Hong Kong, I was afraid to let anybody know about my dreams. Back then nobody was interested in my future, not even my parents. So I usually shared my dreams with the ceiling as I lay in the dark on top of a bunk bed, while my grandmother slept below.
America changed me after I lived here for a while. Running newspapers has also revolutionized my Asian mentality of passivity. Holding on to secrets was no longer a priority. No longer was I afraid to reveal my thoughts and feelings to friends, family, community leaders, even strangers.
The more I express my ideas, the better I am able to articulate exactly what I want. It clarifies and empowers my thinking! My dialogues with other people help me focus on and probe into the strengths and weaknesses of my ideas. Although I didn’t have a written plan in 1982, my head was already dancing with numerous little ideas, like organizing a naming contest for the Seattle Chinese Post.
Lack of confidence discourages many people to tell trusted friends about their plans. Unless you share, you cannot get input or insight from your advisers. More importantly, you will be less worried about what others will think. Knowing your friends are on your side makes all the difference.
Worries are a great distraction. This is what is so great about America: Even if you fail, no one really cares. What people care about is what you do after you fail — they want to see you rebound quickly, learn from your experiences and try your best. There isn’t a lot of respect for people who cover up their failures to save face. American media perceive anyone who overcomes adversity to be inspirational. And if you can laugh at your mistakes and move on, you have advanced to a higher level of humanity and wisdom.
No big plan, just many
small steps
Someone said, “Opportunity comes only once. Seize it while you
can.”
To be able to seize opportunities, you have to recognize them first. That’s one of my strengths. The next move is implementation.
Many people in the last 25 years have offered us tremendous opportunities to make things happen for individuals and organizations because they realize the Northwest Asian Weekly can turn ideas into reality.
I’ve learned that everything we help the community accomplish raises not only our visibility, but also our confidence and ability to strive for others. Ultimately, it enhances our track record and builds goodwill.
I favor these projects not because we can make a million bucks, but because they expand our horizon and passion for making a difference. You might think I am crazy or a bad businesswoman. Every day, I explore new possibilities for myself and the Northwest Asian Weekly.
Take our project of raising funds for United Way of King County in the 1990s, when Phyllis Campbell, now CEO of The Seattle Foundation, was elected campaign chair. She inspired me to help. In response, I created a project to benefit United Way through the production of “West Side Story” at the Northwest Asian American Theatre (NWAAT). We raised $8,500 for United Way, in addition to raising money for the NWAAT production. In the end, the most satisfying moment was watching mainstream community members applauding Asian American performers at the Nippon Kan Theatre — audience members who might not have otherwise visited Chinatown/International District.
I never worry about what lies ahead. When we do our best, I figure someone will notice the Northwest Asian Weekly sooner or later. Certainly you have!
Every step defines
our identity
What makes a good newspaper?
Details. Always details.
Every photo, story, editorial and headline counts. Just one little word printed in the paper can excite our readers.
There are no shortcuts to newspaper publishing. Everything we do gets us closer to the finish line. Each week is a testimony to the importance of our presence in, and contributions to, the community and Washington state.
Take the weekly editorials, for instance. The editor writes them. The mainstream papers have a team of writers and executives on their editorial boards. For the Northwest Asian Weekly, it’s usually the editor and me. We never define who should come up with the topics. However, for the past few years, the responsibility has fallen on my shoulders. At first, it irked me. Shouldn’t it be a shared responsibility among my staff?
“If you cannot change the world, change yourself,” a friend’s e-mail reminded me. It instantly dawned on me that the editorial is not a burden, but an enormous opportunity to prove ourselves.
How can we influence our community if not for our editorials? How can we show the community, politicians and mainstream community where we stand? How else can we present timely and relevant issues for debate, dialogue and reflection within our community? When a reader complained about our recent decision to move the editorial from Page 2 to 11, we took it as good news. Someone is paying attention.
Having embraced the job of coming up with weekly editorial topics, my brain has expanded to incredible dimensions. What I didn’t see or hear before has become my muse. Everything I read or hear can be turned into editorial material. Every e-mail I receive connects me to ideas. Every conversation I have energizes me to look beyond the obvious and mold them into editorial issues. Perhaps there’s magic in being in the business for a quarter of a century.
What separates us from other Asian newspapers is that our editorials link the community with our home, America, and our ancestral countries in Asia. Very few community newspapers can present weekly editorial and commentary topics as global and as local as the Northwest Asian Weekly. Yet we have done it every week. That’s no small feat! Through our editor Carol Vu’s mighty pen, the Northwest Asian Weekly even won a couple of editorial awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association. They really make us proud!
Weekly battles
How do you explain a business that makes steady annual profits but still struggles every week after 25 years? It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the nature of the newspaper business.
In my list of careers, only newspaper publishing can be likened to a battleground. The unpredictability of every issue makes it hard for us to project growth and plan. Surprisingly, we have to build the paper from scratch every week as we scrounge for stories and compete for advertising dollars.
You would think selling a $50 ad is easy for a small business owner. Wrong! It takes only a few seconds to make a phone call or send an e-mail to get a $1,000 or even $5,000 corporate sponsor for our events, but I often fail miserably to convince some small businesses to buy one dinky ad.
We can repeat an ad, but never an article. Unlike television and radio, which rerun their programs many times over the years, everything we print has to be fresh and new; otherwise, it wouldn’t be called news!
In the 24-hour countdown before we go to press on Wednesday evening, every minute for us is like living in a war zone. Hundreds of decisions have to be made, decisions that can make or break us. Let me tell you about some of those “bullets” firing at us during those critical moments.
One community leader called to demand a story not be printed — after the story was already written, edited and laid out on the page.
“We haven’t given you permission,” she said. The fact is, we don’t need her permission, just her blessing. That means a quote from her to validate her side of the story. The Asian community is small. If we angered her, we run the risk of being subjected to some nasty acts if she decided to take revenge.
Another “bullet” can come when a customer calls at the last minute to cancel his full-page ad without good reason. We can’t point a gun at him and say, “Why did you have to screw us like this?” Any pullout of a story or ad close to the printing deadline can throw us into chaos, causing a chain reaction in the office.
Then some important news tip comes across our desk and we have to scramble to write it up quickly and turn it into an article. Then we have to check the facts, edit, proofread and find a photo or graphic before the story is laid out on the page. The front-page stories we have already prepared have to be shifted around to make room for the new story. The clock ticks all the while. If we don’t make deadline, it could affect the printing of the paper, causing disaster the following day.
That’s why it’s so amazing that the Northwest Asian Weekly and Seattle Chinese Post have come out every week, without missing an issue, for a quarter of a century. That’s close to 3,000 editions and countless volumes of paper that fill two truckloads every week, amounting to tons of paper and ink that can occupy more than a couple of football fields.
A restaurateur told me he understands the toughness of our business. “If I don’t have enough diners today, I can save the food in my fridge and sell it the next day, and I don’t waste anything,” he said. “But if you don’t have enough ads for the week, that issue will be a financial loss.”
Just because we have a good-looking product with great articles doesn’t mean people will flood into our office to buy ads and subscriptions. Advertisers buy ads not because the paper is great; they consider a newspaper a valuable product only if their ad generates enough responses to make an impact on their pocketbooks.
You can understand why some newspapers are forced to give away free ad space or offer deeply discounted rates or rewrite old news just to fill up space. Some newspapers go to the extreme of creating their own classified ads, such as marriage proposals, to make their classified section look enticing. Even more alarming: One newspaper recently reprinted our classified ad in its paper without our customer’s permission. Many of those games are hard for outsiders to fathom, but if you are in the business, you realize that sometimes our competitors have no choice. The media business is cutthroat, and only miracles have prolonged our existence for 25 years, despite the fact that digital media are trying hard to push print out of business.
In our fast-paced operation, the only ammunition we have is a strong team that can make speedy, accurate and intelligent decisions. That’s why I avoid going out too much on Wednesday, our production day, because any absence from the office can literally cost me.
For 24 years, the slow time for the newspapers began after Mother’s Day and lasted until September. So I told my staff to take vacations. I don’t know what is unusual about 2007, but everything I predicted has been wrong. This summer turned out to be a record breaker for us. You can imagine how draining and hectic it was for us to put together a 56-page Chinese Post newspaper twice while we were short three staff members. What kept us afloat this summer were pageants, Seafair and the opening of several new businesses.
When we first started, the community had been conditioned not to advertise. Some of them were successful in spite of it. As the years passed, we have had to educate them about the function of an advertisement. For years, my staff had to beg immigrants to buy ads in the Northwest Asian Weekly, not just in the Seattle Chinese Post. Astonishingly, we haven’t had to this year. Immigrants have been putting their ads in the Northwest Asian Weekly as well. In fact, some immigrants want their ads to be only in the Northwest Asian Weekly, period.
Instead of the usual order of black- and red-ink ads, which are more inexpensive, advertisers now demand their ads appear in full color, even before they know the prices. What a contrast compared to the beginning of our enterprise in 1982!
The year 2007 has been dramatic and eventful. The first half of the weeks often look grim, impossible or ordinary, yet luck shines on us towards the last hours of our production cycles and reward us with unexpected harvests.
The Northwest Asian Weekly has succeeded in producing 20-page papers 10 times so far this year, and its sister paper, the Seattle Chinese Post, 40 to 60 pages 11 times! How everything clicks together minutes before press time is still a mystery to me.
How we build a newspaper from ground zero every week actually convinces me that miracles are alive in this day and age! It takes a powerful village to raise the Northwest Asian Weekly and Seattle Chinese Post. I am grateful to our readers, staff, advertisers and the Asian as well as mainstream communities. Thank you for 25 wonderful years!
Next time: the unwritten rules of the newspaper business.
Assunta Ng can be reached at assunta@nwasianweekly.com.
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Northwest Asian Weekly • P.O. Box 3468 • Seattle •
WA 98114
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