Foreign language media finds a receptive audience: newspapers face advertising slump in glutted market.

Foreign language media finds a receptive audience

The Asian broadcast media in Los Angeles County is growing and expanding its market, while the Asian print media, glutted by a boom of foreign language newspapers in the 1980s, is stagnant and struggling.

A few months ago, KAGL, Channel 30, a chiefly religious programming station on the UHF television dial, began selling time to Asian programmers, breaking open a marketplace previously monopolized by KSCI, Channel 18.

"It's going quite well," said program director Ronna Scott. "So far, we're very pleased with the choice."

Holmes Stoner of Artesa Media Services, who helped coordinate the deals, said that Channel 30's success in luring programmers from Channel 18 has led KAGL to "want to expand that foreign language format as quickly and efficiently as possible."

Scott was slightly less enthusiastic. "We're always open to new ideas," she said.

Scott and Stoner differ sharply in their accounts of how the station came to carry the programs, but they agree the arrangement is working out. Scott said KAGL is running an average of three hours of Asian programs a day in Chinese, Korean and Filipino.

In addition to Asian programs, about six months ago KAGL began running entertainment programming from the Star network of Time Life Inc., which features old reruns of black and white programs.

Stoner added that he is negotiating a deal with another UHF station that also may begin running Asian programming in July.

Stoner said the competition is bringing down prices for programming time and advertising.

Rosemary Danon, general manager of Asian-language station KSCI Channel 18, said 1990 was the station's "best year ever" for advertising revenue.

"We're doing very, very well. Our viewership is better than ever," said Danon. Gallup polls show that Channel 18 penetrates 85 percent of the Chinese and Korean homes in the Los Angeles area, she said.

"The Asian media is taking on what happened with the Hispanic media a little while ago," Danon said.

Greg Sullivan, president of San Francisco-based Asian Television Sales, a company that sells advertising time on Asian-language stations, opened an office in Los Angeles last April to meet the growing demand.

"When we started in 1985, everyone said we were crazy. Now they're not so sure," said Sullivan. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg."

Sullivan predicted that the Asian population in Southern California will more than double in the next 10 years, making Anglos the minority. And Asians, on average, have higher incomes and more money to spend than Anglos.

"The banking industry couldn't find a better client," said Sullivan. "The average Japanese family has $86,000 in the bank."

But Asian-American television will never have its own national networks, like Telemundo and Univision in the Hispanic media, because there are too many different Asian languages, said Stoner.

"It (the Asian market) is much more splintered, less focused," said Stoner. "In Southern California, we have more Asians than they have people in Sacramento. Once you get outside California, it's different."

KMAX-FM, which runs Radio Pacific Japan programming for one hour per day, has recently added a weekly Filipino language program to its schedule and a second hour of Vietnamese programming. Korean programming is scheduled to begin any day.

"I'm getting a lot of people who want 12 hours a day. I'm trying to make it a rainbow coalition," said general manager Linda Johnson-Hayes. "The demand (for Asian programming) is more apparent."

Radio Pacific Japan, which faced economic problems in the 1980s, is "doing excellent," Johnson-Hayes said, and is asking to buy more air time. She said things began turning around for Radio Pacific Japan about seven months ago.

KMAX airs a combination of gospel-music programming with a variety of ethnic shows in Spanish, English and Asian languages.

KAZN-AM (K-Asian), which runs exclusively Asian programming, is entering a third year on the air.

"It's no longer an experiment," said partner Dwight Case. "Every advertiser we talk to would like to figure out how to tap the Asian market. I think 1991 is going to be real good. There are a lot more Asian (advertising) budgets than there used to be."

It's a different story in the Asian print media, which has grown so much as to be viewed by observers as saturated.

"There's too many newspapers," said Stoner. "The same thing happened in Spanish when there were too many Spanish newspapers."

Nine Asian dailies were launched in Southern California between 1980 and 1987, plus dozens of weeklies and bimonthlies, and the numbers continued to grow between 1987 and 1990.

In 1987, there was one Vietnamese daily newspaper and four weeklies. Today, there are about 15 Vietnamese papers competing for readers in Southern California, Stoner said. There are 16 Chinese language papers, he said, plus numerous others serving Korean, Japanese and Filipino readers.

Stoner predicted that in the next few years, the number of Asian papers will drop dramatically.

Steve Chin, a partner in the International Daily News, said circulation at the Monterey Park-based Chinese daily has risen only 2 to 3 percent per year recently, despite much larger increases in the Chinese population.

"It (circulation) is not going very well, Chin admitted. But the paper is pleased that advertising revenue rose about 10 percent last year, said deputy general manager Fred King.

"I think it's OK. In 1990, we did OK, so that's why we're trying to expand this year," said Chin. "My own philosophy is a bad time (economically) is a good time."

The paper is opening bureaus this year in New Orleans, Atlanta, Miami and Chicago, Chin said. A bureau in Toronto closed, but other bureaus remain in San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Texas, Taipei and Hong Kong, with a correspondent in Washington. The paper claims a circulation of about 47,000 nationally and in Canada.

At Rafu Shimpo, the largest Japanese daily in Southern California, circulation has been holding steady for years at about 20,000.

"Since we've had this long history, a lot of our readers are elderly and dying," said English editor Naomi Hirahara. "We have to seek to give a reason to second and third generation Asians (to read the paper)."

The largest Asian newspaper in Southern California is Korea Central Daily, a South Korea-based international publication with its U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles.

Korea Central Daily claims a worldwide circulation of 2.5 million. Of that, about 75,000 papers are sold daily in Southern California, increasing to 100,000 on Sunday, said circulation manager Tae I. Son.

While there has been slow growth in local circulation, Son said advertising revenues at his paper have risen 400 percent in the past five years.

"The numbers (of immigrants) are growing fast, so we are growing too. The mainstream in Southern California isn't white right now; it's Asian," said Son. "That's why we are still growing, even though the other newspapers are in trouble."

PHOTO : Media: Asian consumers can choose from numerous outlets