Émigré News Media

News gathering and distribution are key functions of media which are further intensified in the course of migration, as immigrants reach an unfamiliar environment. While information about the host country flows regularly from media in the local language, most immigrants cannot avail themselves of such services because they have not mastered this language. They therefore require their own news sources.

This need for émigré news media was revealed almost a century ago when a groundbreaking study by Robert E. Park (1922) indicated that immigrant newspapers in the United States served as a principal source of information about their new environment for immigrants who had yet to acquire the English language. This environmental surveillance function is often carried out through reports on immigration laws, taxes, legal matters, economics, etiquette and other issues, satisfying the newcomers' basic need for orientation regarding important host society events and thus helping them adjust to their new environment.

The language barrier is not the only reason for immigrants' need for news in their own language. Another factor derives from the tendency among mainstream news media to ignore topics that may interest immigrants or at best to provide partial and [Page 511]distorted coverage of these events. Yet news from or about one's homeland is of special status and value among immigrant populations, who require updated and diverse information about events “over there,” no matter how much experience they have acquired in their new home country.

Furthermore, according to Wan-Ying Lin and Hayeon Song (2006), émigré news media frequently blur the distinction among host, homeland and community news, melding culturally relevant and locally oriented news concerning immigrants in the host society. On the one hand, such stories are ethnically or culturally relevant to a particular immigrant group and, on the other, they are geographically bounded and relate primarily to events in the local immigrant community. As such, news media with geo-ethnic storytelling practices may report home country stories in the same manner as most ethnic media, but go beyond that to make their stories relevant to the local audience. Similarly, news about current events in the host country may be framed to render them more relevant to immigrants: For example, a general announcement of upcoming local elections would not be considered a geo-ethnic news item unless it included information concerning polling sites offering linguistic assistance.