Walk in the door of many grocery stores and restaurants throughout metro Atlanta and the first thing you see is racks of complimentary newspapers.
In a Mexican restaurant on Buford Highway is a stack of the tabloid MundoHispánco. At an Asian restaurant in Midtown you can pick up the current edition of Georgia Asian Times. Go to a Vietnamese restaurant in Forest Park and there's this month's issue of Atlanta Viet Bao.
Although these newspapers are printed in different languages and target distinct populations, all have at least one thing in common - they are feeding the growing appetite for ethnic news in metro Atlanta.
With the Atlanta region's population adding Asians and Hispanics like never before, enterprising journalists are working to produce news and entertainment publications that provide coverage from a perspective that general-interest newspapers can't.
One of the newer entries in the ethnic market is Georgia Asian Times, launched September 2004 by Li Wong, a former reporter with the Wall Street Journal's Asian Times. Unlike many other ethnic newspapers, Wong's 15,000-circulation monthly tabloid is entirely in English.
"I needed ethnic news, but they're all in ethnic languages," he said. "I wanted news on the Chinese New Year and other festivals of interest to all Asians."
And with so many Asian language variations, he said, English is probably the common tongue understood by the largest number of readers interested in Asian culture.
With only a year under his belt, Wong said he expects to expand soon into Florida and Tennessee. Among accomplishments he's proud of, he said, is helping the Atlanta Braves organize an Asian-American night last May.
The founder of what may be the oldest of metro Atlanta's ethnic newspapers, Lino Dominguez, said his Spanish-language weekly MundoHispénco works to keep its growing readership up to date on public service news, as well as featuring targeted entertainment coverage.
"A lot of our stories have to do with immigration," Dominguez said. "We try to focus on the human aspect - how does that affect a family?"
About a year ago The Atlanta Journal-Constitution purchased the newspaper from Dominguez and retained him as publisher.
Recently, MundoHispánico expanded its circulation geography to include Gainesville and Athens, two areas with fastgrowing Spanish-speaking populations.
Bang Bui's Atlanta Viet Bao puts its focus out front, with the word "Entertainment" featured prominently on the cover of the monthly magazine.
"In our community, there is no publication devoted to our entertainment," Bui said.
For 11 years, Bui and his wife, Hanh Hoa, have produced a yearbook with horoscopes, articles and ads catering to the 70,000 Vietnamese immigrants who call metro Atlanta home. On the 15th of each month they distribute about 5,000 copies of Atlanta Viet Bao - or Atlanta Vietnamese Newspaper.
In 1982, years before metro Atlanta became a sort of landlocked Ellis Island, Dominguez paid $10 for the rights to MundoHispénico from the Latin American Association in Atlanta. He distributed 4,500 copies of his first issue, produced with the help of his lone staffer, Carol Ruben.
Now he has about 20 employees working out of a Piedmont Circle office, a circulation of 58,000 and is married to the former Miss Ruben.
His publication is taking on the look of a big-city paper. In recent months MundoHispánico has created distinct sections for "Motores," or the equivalent of the AJC's "Wheels." A new "BienEstar," or "Good Times" section recently made its debut.
"It's not just entertainment, but news about classes and things like rodeos," Dominguez said.
Each of the papers is represented online and includes English-language content.
MundoHispánico recently reconfigured its Web site in a major way, including expanding its offerings in English. Georgia Asian Times offers stories only in English and Atlanta Viet Bao offers its content in English and Vietnamese.
"We came out with a Web site because we needed to compete with other monthly newspapers," Bui said. "The Web site is continuously updated and we sell ads to our customers with the Web site as a value-added" benefit.
Each of the newspapers is free off the rack, meaning that it's the advertisers who provide the income. But then, some of the advertisers are doing well because the papers exist, the journalists say. "A lot of family businesses are small businesses that have grown because of this paper," Dominguez said.