The desired study would be an assessment of the online capacity of ethnic media in the United States. The study should include a quantitative poll as well as a qualitative assessment of the barriers that exist in getting them online, as well as, what they need in order to cross the “digital divide.” The results of this study will allow New America Media to formulate and implement strategies for assisting ethnic media news outlets, particularly newspapers, in establishing a robust web presence, expeditiously and economically.

As advertising moves aggressively to the Internet, we estimate that greater than 60 percent of print and broadcast outlets in the ethnic media sector have little or no online presence. This not only excludes them from online advertising but caps their capacity to grow circulation, especially among tech-savvy younger audiences. It also limits their ability to provide multi-lingual news, share content and interact with their audiences.

As the public spends more of their time online and less time with print, TV and radio, crossing this “digital divide” is critical to the long-term sustainability of ethnic media.

While we have done our own anecdotal surveys of ethnic media we would welcome a more quantitative and qualitative study particularly of print publications to determine their individual and collective capacity to build, host and sustain a web presence.

The desired study would be an analysis of existing ethnic media organizations and would require heavy telephone interviewing of a select group of media and a larger online poll.

The project should begin with at least 3 meetings between the researcher and New America Media staff in order to help the researcher understand the research needs, the nature of ethnic media and to design a questionnaire and create a targeted list of ethnic media to interview. New America Media will work with the researcher to identify ethnic media for the interviews as well as provide introductions asking them to take part in the interview process. We can send out cards and emails to the media encouraging them to take part in the online poll. This initial process should take no longer than one month.

The questionnaire itself should assesses what ethnic media’s current online presence is. If there is none, it should investigate what the barriers and areas of resistance are. Also if the organization has a desire to go online, what they see as the costs and benefits in doing so. Also, if they are online, how often are they updating their content, what trends are they seeing, what are their challenges and how encouraged are they to build-out their sites further. We suggest telephone interviews with 20-25 outlets representing mostly print. We will push out the link to the online poll to all our networks and hope to get at least 100 respondents. The telephone interviews and online polling should take no longer than two months.

The final step of compiling the research report should take about 1 month. Bringing the total project timeline to 4 months.

The research data would be distributed through meetings and listervs frequented by the ethnic media sector. We will also use the data to inform the foundation and philanthropic community in order to build greater support for a “crossing the digital divide” initiative. We will also develop a special section of New America Media’s website devoted to the initiative which summarizes the results of not only this research but our own recommendations on viable, low cost templates and tools for going online; lists of resources that individual outlets can try out; and updates on the initiative.  We will also include a forum for ethnic media partners to report on their experiences online.

The timeframe for the project is approximately 4 months.