Westminster’s Nguoi Viet Daily News is a niche newspaper facing similar, if not greater, problems as its mainstream counterparts.
Like big daily newspapers seeing declines in readers and advertising, Nguoi Viet is facing a crunch of its own.
Nguoi Viet, which translates to “Vietnamese people,” has to prepare for a falloff in its core readers,Vietnamese-Americans in and around Little Saigon.
The daily Vietnamese-language newspaper,the first and the largest of its kind,is thinking about a pending decline in readers as fewer Vietnamese are coming to Orange County, which is home to some 200,000 Vietnamese residents, the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam.
The declining number of immigrants who speak and read Vietnamese as their first language could hit the Vietnamese newspaper business hard, according to vice president and managing editor Hao Nhien Vu.
“We have to look ahead 20 years from now and think about whether we’ll have enough people reading Vietnamese newspapers, Vu said.”
The problem is compounded by second- and third-generation Vietnamese-Americans who are more integrated than their parents and grandparents and are more likely to read the Orange County Register than Nguoi Viet.
For now, Nguoi Viet has a ready-made audience of first-generation immigrants who rely primarily on this paper for their news, said Linda Vo, professor of Asian American studies at University of California, Irvine.
But, “many younger generations who are U.S.-born may understand and speak Vietnamese, but they cannot read and write in it,” Vo said. “It is unlikely that they will subscribe to a Vietnamese language newspaper.”
These cultural shifts are pushing Nguoi Viet to incorporate more English-language stories.
“We’re getting people to read our content in English,” Vu said.
About 90% of the newspaper is written in Vietnamese. Vu said he expects that number to drop and the percentage of English written content to grow.
In 2004, Nguoi Viet launched a weekly section written in English that targeted younger readers called Nguoi Viet 2.
Anh Do, eldest daughter of Nguoi Viet’s founder Yen Ngoc Do, started the English section and continues to edit it.
He recognized a need for young Vietnamese readers to stay on top of news in Vietnam, world events, American and Vietnamese politics and local news. But Anh Do also wanted to keep second-generation Vietnamese-Americans informed and culturally connected to their heritage, she said.
While the section started out small, Vu expects the newspaper’s English content to grow over time along with the cultural changes seen in OC’s Vietnamese community.
“The community’s changing, there are still those that immigrate from Vietnam but overall the community is becoming more Americanized. We have to adapt to those changes,” Vu said.
Nguoi Viet has more than 20,000 subscribers and more than 1 million people visit its Web site every day.
A majority of Nguoi Viet’s subscribers are homes and businesses in Little Saigon, which straddles Westminster, Garden Grove, Fountain Valley, Santa Ana and Huntington Beach.
Roughly 40% of Nguoi Viet’s readers do not read any other news source, Vu said.
“To them, we’re it. We have to be really selective and very accurate about how we present news,” Vu said.
The newspaper has come a long way from its humble beginnings.
Do, a former newspaper reporter and editor and interpreter for French and American journalists, started Nguoi Viet in 1978 out of his garage in Garden Grove. At the time, Little Saigon pioneers Dan Quach and Frank Jao were starting businesses on Bolsa Avenue in Westminster.
Do, who has since died, was among the thousands of Vietnamese refugees to come to America before South Vietnam fell under North Vietnam’s communist control.
The Do family settled in Camp Pendleton with other refugees before moving to Little Saigon in the late 1970s.
Nguoi Viet started as a way to educate and inform fellow refugees about the American way of life while also providing accurate and timely news about the Vietnamese homeland under communist rule.
Do financed the initial press run of 2,000 copies with $4,000 of his savings. The newspaper started out small with Do writing, editing and publishing the four-page weekly newsletter and delivering copies of it door-to-door for free.
The newspaper now employs more than 50 workers at offices in Westminster and San Gabriel. It also has a network of correspondent reporters in Vietnam.
Vu declined to disclose the newspaper’s yearly revenue but indicated that the gross figure is well into the millions.
Nguoi Viet, which partners with Irvine-based Freedom Communications Inc.’s Orange County Register for news, contracts out its printing.
The newspaper has its own network of trucks that deliver the paper daily, Vu said.
While the number of Vietnamese language readers is going down, the price to cater to them is going up.
The rising costs of ink, paper, energy and fuel make it difficult for newspapers and printers not to pass along price increases onto end customers, according to Vu.
Advertising is another issue, Vu said.
Most of Nguoi Viet’s revenue is generated from ads. Roughly 80% of its advertisers are small, local businesses such as nail salons, restaurants, insurance companies and law firms, among other businesses, who have been affected by a slowing economy.
Technology and competition from rivals such as Westminster-based Viet Bao Daily News make the industry even more competitive, Vu said.
This summer the newspaper launched video content on its Web site and is considering adding more technological enhancements such as Podcasts, Vu said.
“We’re trying to survive and to stay competitive,” he said.
