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February 23, 2010

Giant Robot features the works of cutting-edge Asian and Asian American artistsHow cool is this? The March 16 visualizAsian.com show is going to be a conversation with Eric Nakamura, the owner, publisher and co-editor of Giant Robot magazine. Our call with Eric will be at 6 pm PT on Tuesday, March 16! From movie stars, musicians, and skate-boarders to toys, technology, and history, Giant Robot magazine covers cool aspects of Asian and Asian-American pop culture. Paving the way for less knowledgeable media outlets, Eric put the spotlight on Chow Yun Fat, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li years before they were in mainstream America's vocabulary. Although Giant Robot has an Asian pop culture focus, it has earned a loyal readership of all colors. The readers are about half-Asian and half-not. Under Eric's leadership the magazine consistently has featured superior editorial content, innovative design, and a no-holds-barred attitude, garnering Giant Robot notoriety across a diverse crowd ranging from high schoolers to senior citizens. The magazine's graphic sensibility has featured a slew of artists who have gone on to fame in the art world. The magazine's popularity even led to the opening of Giant Robot retail stores, selling the kinds of cool products that the magazine writes about.
August 26, 2009

Tak Toyoshima, creator of Secret Asian Man, and Jeff Yang, one of the editors of "Secret Identities," at the 2009 AAJA Convention in Boston. Tak Toyoshima, creator of "Secret Asian Man," and Jeff Yang, one of the editors of the recently-published book "Secret Identities," sign copies at the 2009 AAJA Convention in Boston. “Where are you from?” “So, where are YOU from?” “Hi, where’re you from?” I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago, at a convention where everyone asked each other “Where are you from?” and no one got offended. It cracked me up, hearing the question over and over. Let me explain, for my non-Asian readers: Just about every Asian American I know – seriously – has been asked this question sometime (or many times) in their life. It’s often preceded by a variation of the statement, “You speak English so well… where are you from?” And once we answer “California,” or “Denver,” it’s often followed by a variation of “No, you know what I mean, where were you born?” Which might be followed, after we answer “California” or “New York City,” by “No, where’s your FAMILY from?” That’s when we can cut off the silliness and get to the point: “Are you asking what’s my ethnic heritage?” I just don’t see European Americans having this conversation, unless they have, say, a British or French or German accent. People assume Asian Americans are foreigners even if we "speak English so well" because of the way we look. Anyway, I heard the “where are you from?” question dozens of times and we all answered eagerly without getting defensive. It’s because the ones asking were also AAPI, and we really did want to know where each other was from. We were at the annual convention of the Asian American Journalists Association, a non-profit professional organization that supports Asian Americans in the media. And after spending several days in Boston with the AAJA, I have hope for journalism.
February 27, 2009

The final front page of the Rocky Mountain News, Feb. 27, 2009We all live our lives way too fast. We rush to work, work at a fast clip, rush home and barely get a chance to chill out before, as a wimpy '70s singer-songwriter once crooned, "we get up and do it again." So the death of the Rocky Mountain News, like the death of a close friend or family member, has given me pause. It's making me reflect a bit on my own mortality: as a news junkie, journalist, writer, Internet geek and human being. First of all, I feel terrible about the Rocky's closing. I feel worse -- a lot worse -- than I thought I'd feel. It's a business decision. But it affects hundreds of people, many of whom I know. In fact, I've known some of the staff at the Rocky for almost 30 years. In between jobs, I've written more freelance stories for the Rocky than for The Denver Post, the newspaper that's left standing in Denver. Now I work for MediaNews Group Interactive, the online operation of the Denver Post's parent company. People -- especially bloggers who cover the media -- like to throw barbs at MediaNews and its owner, Denver-based Dean Singleton because he buys up newspapers and usually trims their operations to make them more profitable. "More profitable" of course is a relative term these days. Maybe we should settle for "less unprofitable" in these terrible economic times.
February 27, 2009

I know I haven't been writing much on the blog -- I have a bunch of things stacked up, and I'm always babbling in small bits on Twitter and Facebook. But I needed to embed this video from the Rocky Mountain News, which is shutting down today. The Rocky's staff has been brave and unfliching in its coverage of the...

January 14, 2009

I missed this column by Howard Kurtz the other day in the Washington Post: "Little Diversity at White House." The first part of the column is about the lack of journalists of color in the White House Press Corps, and focuses on TV and newspaper reporters assigned to cover the presidential beat. It's an important topic, but it saddens me that as usual, the dialogue about race in America is all about black and white. No Hispanics, no Asians, no Native Americans -- the spectrum that's included in the mission of Unity, the uber-organization of Journalists of Color, which just last summer was graced at its convention by a visit by then-candidate Barack Obama. I understand the point is that we now have a black president and there could be more black reporters covering the White House. That's fine for the members of the National Association of Black Journalists, who are probably happy to have gotten their perspective in with Kurtz. But Kurtz dances around the topic of other minorities, hinting at a broader color spectrum but never taking the time to call and quote someone from the Asian American Journalists Association or National Association of Hispanic Journalists or the Native American Journalists Association.
June 7, 2008

As members of the Asian American Journalists Association, Erin and I will be attending the quadrennial UNITY conference in Chicago in July. I attended the last UNITY conference, which was held in 2004, and it was inspirational. It's a combined convention of four national organizations that represent journalists of color: AAJA, the National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Native American Journalists Association. Because it's held every four years, and it happens to be an election year, UNITY attendees will be treated to a forum with Barack Obama and John McCain. It's a powerful, electrifying sight: The candidates for the most powerful position on Earth coming to speak to a roomful of 10,000+ journalists who look like me, as well as other minorities -- who are definitely the majority during UNITY. The conference planners just announced that the Presidential Forum will be held during primetime and broadcast live on CNN.
November 18, 2007

Bill Hosokawa in 2005, sitting next to a caricature at the Denver Press Club
Bill Hosokawa died of natural causes at age 92 in Sequim, Washington, where he lived with his daughter. He was a pioneering Japanese American journalist, author and diplomat who lived in Denver for 60 years. Those are the facts of Bill's life and death. But there's lots more to Bill than just the facts. I wrote an obituary for Bill that will run in the Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League, the APA civil rights organization. Bill was a leader within the JACL, and a columnist for the PC for decades. I'm the editorial board chair for the newspaper, and a national board member of JACL, and I knew Bill because we'd run into each other at many events in Denver. So it made sense for me to write the obit for the PC. But I also owed it to Bill to write about him because he was a role model for me as a writer -- we both wrote columns for Denver's Japanese community newspaper (he kept his up long after I ran out of juice and got too busy). I wrote about Bill's influence on my career years ago, in one of my columns.

September 17, 2006

One of my ongoing passions is pondering the passing of pop culture references. Baby boomers have lived through decades of new hip phrases -- for instance, the hip word for "good" has evolved every few years, from "cool" to "groovy" to "far out" (thanks to John Denver for killing that one off by using it too much) to "excellent" to "bad" to "tight" to other words and phrases.Young people are constantly introducing new words and bringing new meanings to old words. That's a part of the evolution of culture and language.