Posted 9:05 AM by Blah blah

Asian American mags and communities

Click2Asia and aMagazine are going bust! One of Click2Asia's board members, Chin Yao, is a friend of my friend, and we all went kayaking together once.

Click2Asia and aMagazine Shutting Down (AsianWeek):
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Internally, [Click2Asia] also struggled with what many say is the problem with the premise of a monolithic APA market: individual ethnic and language loyalties. According to one former staffer, Chinese employees sat on one side of the office and the Koreans sat on the other, with each group tending to speak in their native tongue....

The original vision [for aMagazine] was something akin to Time magazine for APAs, [Amy] Chu says. None of the founders took any pay, including [Jeff] Yang, who had the biggest stake and was even then the “driving visionary behind the magazine,” she says. Funds for expenses such as printing costs were raised from friends and family, as well as throwing Asian-themed parties at New York nightclubs.

“We always made more money throwing parties than from the magazine,” Chu says.

IN SEARCH OF BUZZ

By the mid-1990s, the magazine had upgraded to offices near Chinatown in Manhattan and moved from an erratic quarterly publication schedule into a true semi-monthly.

As the magazine’s circulation continued to grow, winning big national advertisers remained a struggle. Securing support from APA advertising agencies actually proved an obstacle. Wang, who headed sales at aMagazine for eight years, explains that most ethnic agencies specialize in translating and creating “in-language” ads in Hindi, Tagalog, Korean and other Asian languages. Supporting magazines like aMagazine would’ve “undercut their own bread-and-butter,” she says.

Despite its financial problems, aMagazine, along with Yang, was steadily growing in influence in the community. At the same time, it was slowly morphing into a magazine focused on generating buzz. Its annual list of the 25 most influential APAs — similar to the “New Establishment” list of media elite as anointed by Vanity Fair magazine, the magazine that aMagazine seemed most bent on emulating — was widely discussed. Otherwise, aMagazine tended to feature lightweight profiles of APA actors and authors, first-person pieces about Asian identity and fashion layouts with an artsy tilt.

Occasionally there were hardhitting articles, like a series about APAs in prison. But the magazine, by embracing the upbeat and downplaying the controversial, sometimes appeared to be out of touch with its readers.
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Shows how difficult it really is to make money from the supposed market for pan-Asian, rich young professionals on the Internet. I have an account with Click2Asia but never really used it for anything. aMagazine did have a lot of hot pics of young Asians. But if you read it, did you find yourself coming BACK to it? Even though I'm Asian American and interested in magazines about my "own people," I find the stories they tend to publish very repetitive. They give too limited a view of the world for me. Do you think a good, successful Asian American print magazine is possible? I still have not seen one. The only other AA mag I've seen in the newstands is Yolk. In fact I prefer the online one---Chris and Ki's IIStix---because the people there are real, not celebrities.

Asian American mags seem to circle endlessly around these topics:

- Entertainers who aren't really great actors but, hell, they're cute and Asian, so...
(Lucy Liu, Tia Carrere, Russell Wong, Garrett Wang, Margaret Cho, etc.) How about all the truely talented actors or comedians who are less known? For example, Lane Nishikawa, whom I saw give a hilarious one-man show at the Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley.

- Business leaders like Jerry Yang of Yahoo, David Lam of Lam Research, or Andrea Jung of Avon.

- Asian discrimination and stereotypes (the model minority myth---or "Why should you be studying when you should be out partying and breaking stereotypes?", the Suzy Wong view of Asian women, glass ceilings, Japanese internment camps, etc.) Yawn....

- Beauty issues like heated vs. non-heated eyelash curlers.

- Asian writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and why Asian guys dislike their portrayal in The Joy Luck Club.

- Money...How to buy your next Mercedes.

- Relationships: SISTERLY ADVICE FOR ASIAN MEN, WHAT DO WF LIKE BEST ABOUT AM?, WHAT FOBs THINK OF AMERICAN-BORN ASIANS, What do ABCs think of FOBs, What do ABCDs think of FOBs who are wannabe ABCs, Why Asian guys are shy Nintendo-playing geeks, What his mom thinks of you, How to deal with her poodle, Why arranged marriage may suck at first but last longer than romantic marriage, Why do Asian girls date white guys, How to ask these girls out, Why they still won't go out with you, Why am I spending all my time writing this???
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Andersen is dying?

Formerly the world's top accountant, Arthur Andersen is dying, and that is a huge shame. I understand the legal reasons behind the Justice Dept.'s going full steam ahead with bringing felony charges against the firm, and I have read the scandalous indictment, but it's hard to justify in human terms the blow to tens of thousands of innocent employees who knew nothing about the Enron shredding. (Andersen has been forced to pay huge settlements in the cases of dishonest financial reporting for companies such as Waste Management, Sunbeam, and the Baptist Foundation in Arizona. Enron was the final straw, from the government's point of view.) Not only will thousands of middle and low-level employees have a tough time finding jobs in this depressed market, but a huge fraction of the largest companies in America, for whom Andersen audits and consults, will have to scramble to find new auditors or---in the worst case---risk the wrath of investors by submitting unaudited financial statements for up to 60 days, which the Securities and Exchange Commission is allowing for ex-Andersen clients. My old school, the University of California, is one of the plaintiffs suing Andersen. Since Andersen's reputation is in the tank and clients are fleeing, the bottom line is with this indictment it will have much less money to pay off people trying to recover some of the zillions they lost from Enron. Everybody loses. I hope Andersen does not become the main fall guy for Enron's crooked practices.
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Andersen Crew Baffled but Happy for Hugs (NY Times):

For their part, Andersen employees said they had received gratifying — and surprising — displays of support from clients. Ms. Schleicher said that after she gave a speech about charitable giving to a group of business and civic leaders yesterday, "six people got up and hugged me."...

On the street in front of Andersen's headquarters in Chicago yesterday, one Andersen employee, Bryan Younge, said, "It's a shock." Mr. Younge, who joined Andersen in September, said, "88,000 people have been indicted for the actions of 15 or 20 people."

Tony Gutierrez, a partner in charge of Andersen's marketing practice in New York, echoed that view in describing the feelings of his co-workers, who he said were "good people."

"They're bright people" who get up every morning like everyone else, he said, and "they have a difficult time understanding why the Department of Justice is going after a firm- wide indictment."

Scott Soussa, who works in New York in Andersen's audit practice, said, "This indictment is essentially going to bring us to our knees." He and others in the firm are hoping for changes that will improve the entire industry and for aid for those who were hurt financially by Enron's collapse, he said. The Justice Department, he argued, "has taken the two positive things that could come out of this and put them in severe jeopardy — and that's very tough to understand," he said.

Andersen's employees are facing a world of uncertainty, said Dean McMann, the chief executive of the Ransford Group, a Houston consultant to professional services firms: the industry is in a brutal downturn, so anyone aside from the true specialists and stars who wants to jump to other firms has slim prospects, he said. "There are an awful lot of them in Andersen, and there's not a lot of opportunity," he said....

Another participant in the Vault forums who said that he worked in Andersen's Houston office worried about the possible cloud over employment prospects of Andersen service.

"I am afraid it will keep me from finding a new job," the participant wrote, using the online name popgul. "I can't shake this sick feeling in my stomach."
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An incorrect email has been circulating around the Internet, saying that Esprit, the casual clothing company that was so popular in the 80s, is closing down.

Esprit not closing down, as US e-mail suggests (Straits Times):

"A spokesman for the Singapore office explained that the Hongkong-based Esprit Holdings, which sells the brand outside the United States, recently bought over the American trademark rights of Esprit.

The deal gives the Hongkong company - which is run by former Taiwanese movie queen Lin Ching-hsia's husband Michael Ying - the rights to sell the casual apparel brand in America, on top of the 8,000 Esprit stores in more than 40 countries that it already has....

Yesterday, Esprit's vice-president of the group's finance division in Hongkong, Mr Patrick Lau, told The Straits Times over the phone: 'This is just a big misunderstanding.

'The e-mail is true, but only for the US. We are the opposite. We are expanding into the US.'

The group's net profit surged 40 per cent in the second half of last year, he added."

If you want to get cheap Esprit clothes here in the U.S., however, GO FOR IT!