On March 30, 2020, India Abroad published its last issue. The end of this iconic publication in its fiftieth year has sent shockwaves through a community media sector already reeling from COVID-19. As other leading community media outlets face layoffs, reduced print runs, and even consider suspending publication altogether, India Abroad’s legacy reveals not just the fragility but also the resilience of the community media.
“India Abroad has been gasping for breath for some time, and the virus did it in,” says Sunil Adam, the paper’s editor-in-chief. Launched in 1970 from the mind – and pockets – of its founding publisher, Gopal Raju, India Abroad soon became the flagship in a veritable fleet of news outlets by and for South Asian communities in the U.S. In 2001, Raju sold the newspaper to the Indian online portal, Rediff.com, which sold it again in 2016 to an Indian-American entrepreneur named Suresh Venkatachari, who planned to make it the crown jewel of a South Asian-American community news and entertainment empire. What its later owners perhaps lost sight of, according to Adam, was that the paper was “a community-owned entity, a newspaper catering to a niche community and a niche audience, and with a role to play.”
India Abroad was the launching pad for Raju’s charitable and political forays with the Indian American Foundation and the Indian American Center for Political Action, highlighting the newspaper’s central role in giving its community a voice to express its values – and its demands.
Says WNYC’s Arun Venugopal, whose journalism career began at India Abroad, “The passing of India Abroad has raised real concern about who’s going to be our voice – who will be able to hold those in power accountable.”
In its last years, India Abroad was just one of dozens of publications and outlets serving South Asian communities, and many of these – Bangla Patrika, Everest Times, Khasokhas, Vishwa Sandesh, South Asian Insider, Weekly Bornomola, Urdu News, Urdu Times, and Punjabi Duniya to name a few – have told us they have had to suspend publication amid the COVID-19 outbreak. Parikh Worldwide Media, headquartered in New Jersey and with offices in New York City and Chicago, is the country’s largest Indian-American publishing company, and likewise decided in March to suspend printing its five periodicals: News India Times, Desi Talk, Desi Talk in Chicago, The Indian American, and Gujarat Times. Indian Panorama ceased print publication last November.
This roll call of South Asian-American publications underscores just how many voices clamor to be heard from within the South Asian community. Adam describes how, from his vantage point at India Abroad, he saw the Indian-American community grow in size, regional and linguistic diversity, and amid tremendous political polarization both at home and in the U.S. “It would be hard to reach these different audiences without proper resources,” he says, but maintains that “there is a tremendous need for a credible, well-done news vehicle.”
The diversity of perspectives and voices within the South Asian community media landscape is what is lost in mainstream coverage of these communities. “There are so many schisms that are not evident to the mainstream media, and it was so exciting to navigate that as a journalist,” says Venugopal, observing that much of the mainstream media’s difficulty in accurately covering race and immigration is about lack of access to the complexity in communities of color: the inequity, polarization, and diversity that exists within communities.
“Working at India Abroad, I got to see that we’re not a fossilized community, we’re constantly changing,” he says. “There’s something particularly thrilling about being able to voice and articulate that, and in this intimate voice that you can only hear in this corner of the media world. If we lose this good journalism, we’re losing something of our collective narrative – our community’s ongoing story.”
Other communities are losing their essential voices amid this pandemic too. Gazeta Brazilian News, the largest Portuguese-language newspaper serving Brazilian communities in Florida, Boston, New York and New Jersey, has suspended its print edition after 25 years, as have Illyria, a 27-year-old Albanian-American newspaper based in New York City, and the 32-year-old Norwood News, a community newspaper covering the Bronx. World Journal, headquartered in New York City and with offices throughout the East Coast, Midwest, and West Coast, is the leading newspaper published in Chinese communities across the U.S., and has had to drastically reduce its page count; before the pandemic its issues ran upwards of 140 pages. The Indypendent, a Brooklyn-based progressive newspaper, has had to cut its circulation by nearly 50%, and Daily Challenge, which serves New York City’s Black community, has had to decrease its normally five-times-a-week publication schedule.
These losses are happening even as the demand for community-based journalism continues to rise. Publishers are innovating and thinking creatively to continue meeting this demand. Rick Ho, the general manager of Sing Tao Daily, which serves the Chinese-American community in New York City, told us that his team began preparing for quarantine as early as December, linking laptops to the outlet’s server in preparation for the advertising and circulation departments to work remotely. Hank Levy, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Post began offering deeply discounted special ads to local businesses, and for politicians to communicate with constituents. Khalil ur-Rehman, editor of the Urdu Times, organized a back office in Pakistan to design a PDF version of his publication for his readers to download and print.
Creativity, innovation, and resilience are hallmarks of this sector after all. After his long and illustrious career at India Abroad, Sunil Adam is still not done. “I want to retire not as the guy who ended a 50-year paper, but as the guy who started something new, with a future.” He’s launching a platform for commentary and personal essays by Indian Americans. “I want the Indian-American perspective to come out.”