Shortly after Vera Azuka Idam arrived in the US, she wasn’t feeling well and went to the doctor to see what was wrong. They poked and prodded, asked lots of questions. They sent her home without a diagnosis.
“And then two weeks later, I got a bill for $17,000. I almost died. I’m telling you!” she said.
A gossip magazine journalist in her native Nigeria, she wasn’t planning on paying a bill of that size. After making some calls, she was able to get the bill reduced to a more manageable $5,000.
Her own Google research led to a self-diagnosis: acid reflux.
Concerned that other immigrants might not be able to figure out similar solutions to what life in the foreign land of America might throw at them, she decided to create a Facebook page and share both stories and solutions.
“All those pieces of research I did, I had to somehow get it out to the community,” said Idam, 52.
Then, she went to visit some relatives in Canada, who reminded her of her successful stint as a reporter with Nigeria’s City People Magazine and asked why she couldn’t create something more substantial.
“Can you not start a magazine and just tell people what’s going on?” her relatives asked her. “And that just rang a bell. And I said, yes, I had to do it.”
Afrik Digest was born. “I loved to write about events. It was just a passion for me. . . . I just moved into it easily,” she said.
The first issue was in September 2014. Doing the research herself and then outsourcing the writing of stories about Africans in Colorado to writers back in Nigeria, she kept the free publication going by selling ads and supplementing it with money she made as a network administrator.
Three months ago, when advertising dollars virtually dried up, she pivoted to an online-only version.
“I told myself [it] was good enough,” she said during a recent interview in her Aurora home, which doubles as the editorial offices of Afrik Digest.
Recently, she joined the new Colorado Ethnic Media Exchange. It’s a group consisting of a handful of publishers of ethnically owned newspapers and newsmagazines, or those serving a largely ethnic or immigrant audience. They meet Friday mornings to discuss ways to work together. Can they share ads? Collaborate as far as solving problems unique to their niche industry?
That’s the goal, said Brittany Winkfield, president of the group.
“It was really within the last year where we’ve gotten some traction and movement to move forward, a shared group model where we’re presenting ourselves as a network. And when you buy into the network, you then get exposure to this great audience,” said Winkfield, 38. Other members include Enterate Latino, a Spanish publication serving Western Colorado; the English-language Asian Avenue, and the Aurora Sentinel, invited to join because of the ethnic diversity of Aurora.
During a recent meeting, they discussed a memo of understanding and strategies for seeking group sponsorships; Winkfield mentioned that the Colorado Media Project and Rocky Mountain Public Media Organization had invested grant funding into the network.
Making Afrik Digest a community center in print
That’s good news to Idam, who wants her publication to be like a community center in print.
“Afrik Digest just wants to amplify the voices of Africans and people of African descent … getting the information from somewhere and delivering [it] to them so that they can be educated and informed on what’s going on,” said Idam, who was bubbly and lively during an interview in which she wore a dress of what appeared to be a West African print, speaking with a slight lilting accent.
She said she’s noticed that people who immigrate to Colorado from African countries become wallflowers where civic engagement is concerned.
“I know I can vote. . . .” she said, but not everyone from African countries now living in Colorado has learned as much as she has about how to become a citizen and take part in local elections.
“I try to tell them all the time, and we organize events, engagement, so that we can tell them, ‘This is about you. These policies are about you. You have to be a part of it. You have to make your own voice heard. What’s your view on it?’ We want them to be integrated into the larger community and not just be alone on their own.”
She said sometimes people from Africa are more likely to receive information from people who look like them and share their cultural experiences, and that has guided how she creates content.
“I know what we listen to, and [I] then present it in a format so that they can hear,” she said.
She uses the publication to inform readers on subjects like open enrollment periods they should be aware of, as well as some African movies screening around Colorado.
Colorado Chinese News has published since 1994
Asian movies playing around Colorado is a feature in a recent 20-page issue of Colorado Chinese News. Now about 20 pages, down from 46 pages, it is edited by Wendy Chao, who pointed out an article about a Thai film that will screen in Colorado, with photos and details about the actors. Another story was about fundraising efforts of Asian groups that create scholarships for Asian students in Colorado, and an update on a direct flight from Hong Kong to Dallas. Wendy Chao doesn’t know what the future holds for her member publication, which published its first edition in 1994.
During a recent interview at the newsroom in Southwest Denver, the place was almost bare, with pictures once hanging on the walls now lining the floor in preparation for moving. Dressed in a three-piece suit of brown, blue and orange with a Chinese collar, Chao said she’s going to move into a condo that will have two rooms devoted to the publication that focuses on topics that Chinese in Colorado care about.
“Have you heard of that beautiful story called Moon Festival?” she asked, pointing to an article about it in a back issue. Chinese people’s love of celebration – including the Dragon Boat Festival and Chinese New Year – are among the stories her readers enjoy, she said.
Another hot topic in her publication has been the Dear Abby-style advice column syndicated in hers and other Chinese language newspapers.
“See this one, let me see, what did he say? This one is to say the mother have to go to the work, right?”
The writer seeking advice was needing to work fulltime, and wrote in asking for advice about finding childcare.
“. . . [To] put my children to day care . . . but he don’t know how to do the best for the children. . .” she said, easily translating from the elaborately detailed Chinese characters in the paper to English.
Another function the paper serves: giving a Chinese point of view to national news. For example, now that the Chinese government allows families to have more than one child, American families who want to adopt Chinese babies will no longer be as able to do so as they had in the past.
“If you want to adopt the China children, the time is gone,” she said, pointing to a headline of a story about that.
“See, that’s a bigger title,” she said, adding that such a story would be reported on differently for Chinese readers. They would consider the change is a benefit, because larger families will mean siblings can split the responsibility of caring for aging parents, rather than taking it on alone.
Chao came to the United States decades ago with her husband when his brother got a professorship at CU Boulder. She left behind her career as a high school Chinese literature teacher in Taipei, Taiwan.
Colorado Chinese News serves readers not only in Colorado, but in the Rocky Mountains region. She said that because there is no other Chinese-language newspaper in North or South Dakota, Wyoming, Kansas or New Mexico, people in those states rely on hers. When a Chinese restaurant owner wants to sell or hire more staff, it’s her publication that carries those ads in Mandarin.
They print out about 4,000 editions, down from 5,000 before the pandemic.
El Comercio de Colorado serves growing Hispanic readership
Jesús Sánchez Meleán’s publication, El Comercio de Colorado has more than triple the circulation. The free 30-page publication prints about 15,000 hard copies every two weeks and is distributed at 1,200 racks in convenience stores, restaurants, bars, beauty salons, and body shops with Hispanic clientele.
Sánchez Meleán, 60, came to Colorado after arriving in the US as a Fulbright Scholar. Seeing a need for a publication by and about people identifying as Hispanic in the state, he started in the newspaper in 2006. Also a member of CEME, it now has both a printed edition that comes out every two weeks, and a more timely English/Spanish digital edition that they update with breaking news.
Some recent headlines announced articles about former President Donald Trump’s plans to visit Aurora; the opening of a new Honduran consular office; and a look at the state's new 8th Congressional District, which is more than one-third Hispanic.
The publication organized a conversation among Hispanic voters who discussed topics such as migration, reproductive rights and inflation. The discussion showed “divergent views on asylum restriction and voting rights” within Colorado’s Hispanics, who are from a range of countries, backgrounds, and socioeconomic levels. As such, Sánchez Meleán said his publication can cover issues of interest to Hispanics with more nuance than mainstream publications.
The staff consists of three journalists, two technical designers, two marketers and two distribution specialists. It gets more than 200,000 hits each month online.
“We update the web every day with breaking news. . . our original material, which is more in-depth stories and our own agenda,” he said.
He said not everyone shares his agenda.
“This is not news for a mainstream media, but it’s news for us, because the idea is [to] motivate the people,” which he said often happens by elevating accomplishments: “Maybe it’s a student who finished high school . . . and this is the first person of the family [to] get a degree, or the owner of a restaurant who finally achieved the goal of having their own business.”
The paper fills the language gap created through generations: while Hispanic millennials are often bilingual, their parents or grandparents may not be. If they don’t speak or read in English, there aren’t many other ways to get Colorado news in Spanish.
“So this is a moving situation that we need to handle when we publish or create content: the language reality, because we need to serve all of these [varieties] of people.” said Sánchez Meleán.
That’s also the aim of Afrik Digest that has reported on the events of African Leadership Group’s investment training for its members and that ran a profile of Yemi Mobolade, an immigrant from Nigeria who is now the mayor of Colorado Springs.
Since the publication isn’t breaking even, editor Idam had to look in other directions for money. After 10 years as a network administrator, she opened Celebrity Confetti Events Place in Aurora in June 2023.
“I’m telling you, it’s not been easy,” she said, citing her appreciation for CEME, which might help her find a more workable business model. “It’s been my job that’s been yielding and helping to fund it. . . . I’ve been funding it for all this while and just because I cannot stop. But the money is not coming in, the advertisement is not there. It’s been very very difficult.”
And that’s why CEME could help: Sánchez Meleán said through CEME, leaders of ethnic-serving publications will be able to identify similar goals and try to solve problems they share of visibility, growth, connectedness to their audience and ad sales.
“So it’s a tool for accessing more advertising, basically. We need to act as an industry because we are healthy, we are alive, we are growing, we are dynamic,” he said. “And why not we can make an effort together for projecting or getting more room or a bigger pie, or a bigger piece of the pie?”
Winkfield hopes the answer to that question will be positive. “I’m an ambassador for the publishers and . . I do appreciate just being able to create something that may not have existed before or something that we don’t know exactly what it is,” she said.
- New group founded and led by refugees and immigrants holds launch at History Colorado this weekend
- New data shows term ‘Latinx’ dwindling in popularity
- A recent report examines Colorado’s diverse Asian populations by disaggregating unique nationalities
- With a range of accents, a unity poem years in the making is brought to life through culturally diverse voices
