Technology delivers the suburban news in Chinese
Colin Kerr, Editor Northern District Times, winner of the Technology Award of the Multicultural Marketing Awards of Mr Kali Cama, Development Executive from the Westin Hotel
Tonight's Awards dinner was hosted by the NSW Minister for Citizenship and Fair Trading, Virginia Judge.
The Multicultural Marketing Awards have been conducted by the Community Relations Commission of NSW for the last 20 years.
The Northern District Times which services Sydney northern regions of Gladesville Ryde and Epping Eastwood was driven by dramatic demographic changes in its readership to find a way to get news and advertising to 21,000 Chinese speakers in its catchment area.
Congratulating the newspaper, the Chair of the Commission, Stepan Kerkyasharian said:
"They saw it as a challenge to their traditional role that a large number of potential readers couldn't read English.
"This is a readership which a newspaper cannot ignore, editorially or commercially, the paper said in its submission.
"They decided they would give those readers the news they needed in Chinese, but without printing two newspapers.
"Naturally, they decided to continue publishing in English, but on each printed story which they thought was directly relevant to readers of Chinese background they put a link to the paper's website, where the same story would appear in traditional Chinese characters.
"A very neat and clever solution, using technology", Mr Kerkyasharian said.
The paper has since gone on to expand its commitment to its Asian readers producing a bi-lingual wrap-around for the Lunar New Year, creating, they claim, a first for a mainstream newspaper in Australia. They are now looking to meet the needs of Korean readers as well.
Meanwhile, when the recent tragedy occurred in North Epping, with the murder of several members of the Lin family who ran the local newsagency, the Northern District Times became a significant provider of news about the investigations, in both English and Chinese, to a number of national media outlets.
"We, in the Commission, have long been aware that a large part of the readership of suburban newspapers is people of non-English speaking background people who may not buy a mainstream paper because their English was limited but who would naturally pick up the free suburban paper off the lawn.
"Many local papers appreciated that fact a long time ago and started putting lots of non-Caucasian faces and stories in their papers because they know that's who reads them. The Northern District Times has taken that understanding well and truly a big step forward.
"This is a real technology achievement because it is about using technology to meet a specific challenge to a business or its identity, created by demographic change.
"And, isn't that what these awards are all about - combining our great inventiveness as Australians with the talents, skills and knowledge that comes to us with migrants from other countries and other continents?" the Chair concluded.