BCBusiness

SOuRCES: WESTBANk FIRST NATION, ABORIGINAl TOuRISM ASSOCIATION OF B.C., AFOA CANAdA, started as a direct-to-WeChat news platform before launching its site late that year. Now Lahoo claims to have a readership of some 60,000. Banner ads on one of its recent front pages—for a Jaguar dealership, a high-end homebuilder and a corporate law •rm touting o•ces in Richmond and Beijing—o-er a snapshot of its audience. The other Chinese-language news publications based in Vancouver range from Rolia .net, an online forum with bargain tips, to Vanpeople.com, a meme-heavy celebrity gossip site. Qidian.ca, another Chi- nese web portal, o-ers a rough ranking based on Alexa score, which tracks web tra•c over a three-month period. On top is BCBay.com, a message board– cum–news site founded in 2003, which has a sta- of about 20; followed closely by Lahoo; then student-focused Vanpeople and generalist site Vansky.com. For all these publications, the target audience is a mix of new and established immi- grants from mainland China, as well as the growing cohort of Chinese-speaking international students. To illustrate the linguistic complexities involved, Wan describes a matrix. On one axis are the two characters systems, simpli•ed and traditional—the former used in mainland China, the latter in Hong Kong and Taiwan. On the second are the spoken dialects of Cantonese and Mandarin. Although it's less a problem for print than broadcast, speakers of each tend to be used to its idioms and style. Finally, there's the content: immigrants from Hong Kong want to read about their former home, but readers with main- land ties are interested in news from Shanghai and Beijing. Over the past decade, Vancouver-based daily Sing Tao has made serious e-orts to court mainland audiences. In 2007 it launched Dushi Bao, or Canadian City Journal, a weekly compiled by reporters and editors with professional backgrounds in China. Sing Tao lacks the robust WeChat presence of its smaller competitors, but it's the market leader in free simpli•ed-Chinese print papers, with a circulation of 10,000, says editor-in-chief Victor Ho. "We can maintain bet- ter quality, a more professional newsroom," he contends, point- ing to the paper's leading cover- age of the New Can Consultants scandal, an immigration fraud case of great interest to readers who are immigrants from China. Sing Tao maintains a clear divide between its newsroom and sales department, says Ho, who criticizes the practice he claims his publication's rivals use. "As far as I know, these competitors have so-called representatives that they send to press confer- ences, but they're basically salespeople with the capacity to write stories," he asserts. "In my humble opinion, they're not journalists." Many of Sing Tao's com- petitors lean on the reporting of English-language news organi- zations, often copying, translat- ing and summarizing stories in short posts •lled with images and GIFs, Periphery's Wan says. (On his LinkedIn page, one for- mer Lahoo intern lists "translat- ing articles from the Economist into Chinese" as among his responsibilities there.) "You can't outlaw it," Wan maintains of lift- ing content wholesale. Editor Xiao defends Lahoo, which employs professional journalists, including those with experience at now-defunct World Journal and Beijing Television. Not even online portals are safe, Wan observes. Many inter- national students are turning to news accounts that publish exclusively on WeChat, like the popular Van Bao Bao, which often pulls in as many shares on its content as Lahoo and BCBay, he explains. Xiao welcomes the competi- tion. "Our main purpose is to make people feel at home in Canada," she says. "If more people are involved in the same business as ours, that's not a bad thing at all." ONLINE CROWD Top five Chinese- language news websites based in Metro Vancouver, by 2017 Alexa traffic score (lower score equals higher ranking) That's the square footage of commercial real estate managed by the Okanagan's Westbank First Nation (WFN), the largest such on- reserve development in the country. AFOA Canada (formerly the Aboriginal Financial O•cers Association of Canada) will feature WFN as a case study of leader- ship success at its inaugural conference in Vancouver from October 2 to 5. Some 1,300 business owners, chiefs, elders and •nancial managers from indigenous communities around the world will discuss long-term planning, economic prosperity and international cooperation. Terry Goodtrack, CEO of AFOA Canada, says WFN and other participants bring lessons about establish- ing •nancial and social sustainability after achieving self-governance. "Why these highly skilled •nancial managers exist [in these communities] is because now there is a role," Goodtrack explains. "You're no longer managing poverty; you're managing wealth and prosperity." by Melissa Edwards Nation Building numerology 1,450,000 SOuRCE: QIdIAN.CA 18 BCBusiness OCTOBER 2017 1 National publi- cation based in Burnaby 2 Includes Vancouver and Toronto editions cre aderS.ne t (3,485) 1 Singtao.ca (12,903) 2 BcBay.com (22,865) L aHoo.ca (36,043) VanpeopL e.com (37,141)

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