C
onventional wisdom
has it that newspapers
are dead, right? Well,
somebody forgot to tell
B.C.'s ethnic press.
"Mainstream media has
always been slow inrecogniz-
ingthe ethnic market," says
Harbinder Singh Sewak, pub-
lisher of Post Group Multimedia's
three newspapers—the Asian
Pacic Post, South Asian Post and
Filipino Post—which together
distribute 100,000 copies
throughout the Lower Mainland
each week. Malaysian-born
Sewak launched his †rst paper,
the Southeast Asian Post (later
renamed the Asian Pacic Post)
in 1993, and by 2001 the Post's
now-signature white newspaper
boxes were erected alongside
those of the Vancouver Sun and
Georgia Straight at street corners
throughout the Lower Mainland.
Sewak's achievement has been
recognized by contemporaries
both here and abroad: in 2003,
the Asian Pacic Post won a Jack
Webster Award for community
reporting, and Sewak won the
top media prize at the World
Sikh Awards in London in 2013.
While the Post Group papers
operate in a post-recession, post-
digital world—where ad dollars
once reserved for newspapers
increasingly go to Google—Sewak
notes that an increase in big
corporate advertisers has more
than o"set losses from smaller
local accounts: "There has been
(ABOVE) PAUL JOSEPH AUGUST 2015 BCBusiness 11
T HE MON T HLY IN FOR MER
TMı
"Failure is the number
one thing that leads
to success. It's not the
fact that you failed; it's
what happens in the
moments right after"
–Greg Malpass, p.16
"People want to
know what's hap-
pening in their com-
munities–they like to
have [these papers]
as a resource to
communicate their
feelings"
– Vinnie Combow,
Voice Group of Publica-
tions general manager
A U G U S T 2 0 15
The Language of Prot
M e d i a
Newspapers may be an increasingly marginal business, but
ethnic papers are proving the exception by Trevor Melanson
INSIDE
Dog hotels ... Frank Giustra's very public year ... Getting Traction ... The 411 on IP + more ...
NEWSPAPER MAN
Harbinder Singh
Sewak's Post Group
now puts out three
weekly newspapers
"People want to
know what's hap
