Minority Coverage Reflects Changing World

El PASO--Welcome to the future, a place of blurred borders, where Spanglish lays claim as the prevailing patois, Spanish dominates the top-rated newscast and English splatters the pages of a special section produced by the big daily newspaper south of the Rio Grande.
Messy? Not for the linguistically nimble. El Paso and its Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juárez are joined at the cash register, joke residents. And that's why many of the biggest names in media are profitable here.
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Dallas has been a minority-majority city for at least a decade. But when it comes to the public contracts -- for items and services as prosaic as road repair and as prestigious as preserving art-deco showpieces at Fair Park -- minority-owned businesses are losing ground.
A review of public records by The Dallas Morning News shows a decline over four years in the share of public contracts awarded to minority-owned businesses by the city of Dallas.
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Whether it's Mex-America as a consumer market joined at the cash register, or watchdog journalism in government contracting, the minority business beat is ready to be harvested for stories that shed light on the top demographic, globalization, marketing, and political trends in the U.S.

My approach to stories on this beat was to look at minorities as both entrepreneurs and a consumer market. That provided more ground to cover, as these two opening story passages show. It was natural to include immigration as part of our coverage. Fully 40 percent of U.S. Latinos are foreign-born and more than 60 percent of the Asian community is foreign-born.

Minority business and minority consumers became the prism for examining convulsing demographics of the U.S., the blurring of the borders and the democratization of capitalism. And at times, it was a ruse to write about pop culture and sociology.

The Human Touch
It's essential to find the people to carry the tale. Finding the good tales means getting out in the community, and creating a chain migration of lively sources.

Some of that can be done in the many niche and specialized chambers of commerce and trade groups in your area. They will vary from the Hispanic chambers of commerce to the tech-oriented members of TIE, the Indus Entrepreneurs which was founded in the Silicon Valley.

Sometimes, great tales spill simply and powerfully from the cleaning crews at your desk at night. They can tell you about remittance flows, how their cousin got their job by "renting" a genuine Social Security number, or how hometown associations from Mexico are building the economies of the villages back in Guanajuato or Zacatecas, Mexico.

Other times, the good tales come from the world of politics, your city council, and the lobbying around municipal bonds. Bonds can provide a look into the clubby world of investment bankers, who sell the financial instruments for city improvements. In the last three decades, a number of investment banking firms have been started by minorities and women. And their rise parallels the rise of black mayors and Latino and Asian-American elected officials, who've then assisted with opening doors that led to bond business.

Challenges
There are challenges. One is that minority businesses tend to be small and privately held. There aren't the usual document tools available, such as 13Ds, 10Ks and proxies.

But you will find other toolkit essentials: federal bankruptcy records or federal and state court records, complaints to the state attorney general and research reports on the size and buying habits of the market. Among the most useful is the annual report by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia, or www.selig.uga.edu.

Each year this center charts the growth of each market -- black, Asian, Native-American and Hispanic -- and compares it with non-Hispanic whites.

The Pew Hispanic Center and the Brookings Institution provide excellent fodder for strong tales out of minority communities. Though "Hispanic" is carried in its name, the Pew Hispanic Center frequently looks at non-Hispanic black and white communities for comparison.

The U.S. Census Bureau also does a survey every five years that tracks minority-owned businesses, their type and their employee size and their revenue stream. Unfortunately, it won't tell you how many of these businesses survive.

Go Global

Think global. Obviously many of the consumers are doing this and that's why they've moved to the U.S.

The Census Bureau has a new tool, the American Community Survey, which gives foreign-born percentages for smaller geographic regions.

Each year, immigrants are sending swelling sums of money back to the homeland. That money is tracked by the World Bank and by many central banks. The Mexican Central Bank provides monthly figures at www.banxico.gob.mx.

The Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank are also doing strong research on this issue.

Create a database
For a decade, we've tracked the rather slow rise of minorities and women onto the boards of directors and into the executive suites of publicly traded companies of Corporate America. It is a time-consuming process but well worth the effort as watchdogs for the public. We use our own surveys and SEC filings to do this work. And then, we cross-check how our region compares with the nation, using such sources as Catalyst and the Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility.

Much of the work requires simple tenacity and good organization of material. And all of it is worth it for the strong tales to be told.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism