Prometheus 6

I find that fascinating. I wonder if they'll get into the Republican convention at all.

With an Assist, Minority Press Sends Reporters to Democratic Convention
By SAKI KNAFO

Denver

A DAY before the start of the Democratic National Convention, on an airplane somewhere over the Midwest, The New Yorker’s esteemed political essayist Hendrik Hertzberg was spotted eating a sandwich. About 10 rows behind him sat a group of reporters from lesser-known New York-based publications: The Irish Echo, The Haitian Times, Sing Tao Daily, The Weekly Bangla Patrika, a Polish-language newspaper called Nowy Dziennik and an Arabic-English paper called Aramica.

“Our outlets never send people for events like this,” said Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, the reporter for Nowy Dziennik, as the plane soared above farmland, shopping malls, bowling alleys, used-car lots, megachurches and other fixtures of American life. “We always cover it through other agencies or media because we don’t have resources to, like, pay for a flight ticket.”

In New York, some 300 papers in more than 70 languages make up what is commonly known as the ethnic press, and over 50 such publications are members of the New York Community Media Alliance, a nonprofit group whose small, overworked staff had arranged the journey to the convention.

“They are like an umbrella organization that is, like, fighting for us when we are just too small players for the big shots,” Ms. Kern-Jedrychowska said.

During the convention, she and her traveling companions would be staying together in two modest houses in a remote part of Denver, where they would be joined by a bureau chief for The Indian Express and a Pakistani-American journalist who owns a gas station in Florida. Some of the reporters would sleep on the floor. None of them had received the coveted “floor passes” that allow journalists to interview delegates on the floor of the convention hall.

Such adversity is nothing new for these journalists.