Editorial: A great honor for 2-year-old Wind Newspaper being designated as San Francisco's citywide outreach advertising periodical for the Chinese community

While we are still celebrating Wind Newspaper's second anniversary since September 1, 2020 of serving the San Francisco Chinese community in both English and Chinese languages in print and online for free, we are very honored to be designated as the only news publication to reach out to the Chinese community citywide for the City and County of San Francisco.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution on September 6 to designate Wind Newspaper as the outreach community periodical of the city for the Chinese community for the fiscal year of 2022-2023. As part of the resolution, a recommendation by the Budget and Finance Committee to add World Journal to the list of neighborhood outreach newspapers for the Sunset and Portola neighborhoods was also passed by the full Board of Supervisors.

We are thankful for the support from all supervisors, especially District 4 Supervisor Gordon Mar who has made his efforts to review Wind Newspaper's application and complaints as well as to have meetings with the City Administrator Carmen Chu's office and Office of Contract Administration to find out more facts of the applications between different publications.

In July, we filed complaints with all members of the Board of Supervisors and Ethics Commission that a much lower circulation number of Wind Newspaper, from 4,000 reduced to 1,450 weekly, was unfairly put into the scoring system for evaluation of the outreach advertising contracts. As a result of the wrong numbers, World Journal was recommended to be awarded with the citywide Chinese community outreach contract.

We also filed a complaint in July that Supervisor Connie Chan, who was offered a 8-week radio live shows at Sing Tao Chinese Radio in June and July, was allegedly inappropriate with conflict of interest to add Sing Tao Daily to the outreach advertising list for 5 Asian neighborhoods, including Chinatown, Richmond, Sunset, Excelsior and Visitacion Valley. However, Sing Tao Daily did not complete its entire application process and was not recommended by the city.

At the July 12 Board of Supervisors meeting, Sing Tao Daily was approved to be on the list. Moreover, Supervisor Mar proposed to send the citywide Chinese community outreach recommendation back to the Budget and Finance Committee for further discussions.

On July 20, Sailaja Kurella, Director and Purchaser of the Office of Contract Administration, stated in the Budget and Finance Committee meeting that her office had overlooked some circulation numbers of Wind Newspaper and the numbers were updated which led to the outreach contract being recommended for Wind Newspaper instead.

Supervisor Mar proposed on July 27 at the Budget and Finance Committee meeting to add World Journal to the list of neighborhood outreach advertising for both Sunset and Portola. The proposal was approved by all three members of the committee, Chair Hillary Ronen, Vice-Chair Ahsha Safai, and Mar.

On September 6, the first Board of Supervisors meeting after the August summer recess, all Supervisors voted to approve Wind Newspaper as the city's outreach publication for the Chinese community in the fiscal year of 2022-2023.

Wind Newspaper launched on September 1, 2020

I had the idea of founding Wind Newspaper on the night of April 9, 2020, when I received a call from my former employer, World Journal, to inform me that it was my last day at work after serving over 33 years as a news reporter. It was at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

In the midst of the early pandemic, the Shelter-in-Place order was issued that required everyone to remain at home with the exception for essential needs.

I lost my job as one of the longest serving journalists in the San Francisco Bay Area Chinese media. Instead of staying at home looking for a new job, I was planning to start a brand new news publication with my son, Ernest Man who is a young software engineer. Ernest built our website and taught me how to edit and manage a newspaper online.

After almost five months of planning, Wind Newspaper was born on September 1, 2020. It was designed to be an English and Chinese bilingual weekly paper to serve the community for free both in print and online.

We have made history as the first newspaper nationwide to provide all the articles in three languages, English, traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Wind Newspaper is also presently the only English and Chinese bilingual news publication in the state of California.

I call Wind Newspaper a local startup and fully independent community paper with no funds from any investors and solely relying on advertising as well as personal savings. But we have made huge impacts on the community in the past two years.

We broke a number of the major news stories, including saving the 100-year-old Far East Cafe in San Francisco Chinatown which was almost in bankruptcy and donations coming from all over the nation after the story was published.

We were also the first news media to profile the volunteer work of parent Kit Man Lam who collected a record number of 12,698 signatures for the successful recall school board election and became the focus of the national news.

As of the latest, we broke the story of the controversial cannabis business license application at 2490 San Bruno Avenue in Portola which is one of the largest Asian neighborhoods in the city. The community has strongly opposed the opening of the dispensary.

Wind Newspaper has set its goal to serve all members of the local Chinese community, no matter if they are poor or rich, English or Chinese speaking, and to keep them informed with the community news.

While our circulation has grown in the last two years, we are very much grateful for all the support from the community as well as the San Francisco Independent Press Association and the Bay Area Media Agency.

Although we might compete with Sing Tao, World Journal, and China Press in the process of bidding for the city's outreach advertising contracts. In the news market, Wind Newspaper is not able to be a competitor of Sing Tao Daily or World Journal.

Both papers are competitors between themselves. Sing Tao Daily and World Journal share a similar corporation structure that they are owned by the newspaper giants in Hong Kong and Taiwan respectively. Both of them are paid, daily, nationally-circulated papers with overwhelmingly overseas news stories.

In the meantime, Wind Newspaper is a small, free, weekly, bilingual, and local-oriented community newspaper. But we are very unique in being the only newspaper in the nation with the language capability serving the immigrants and American-born members of the Chinese community as a whole. We are also the only locally owned newspaper serving the Chinese community in language focusing on local issues.

As we always discuss between our publisher partners in the San Francisco Independent Press Association meetings, the City and County of San Francisco has provided zero or very minimum funding to support our local community papers, compared to other metro cities in the nation, like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

To run a small newspaper to keep the community informed is not easy. We thank you for all the support from all communities who believe in independent journalism.

● Portia Li is the founder and publisher of Wind Newspaper