Orange County is home to five flourishing newspapers with a difference apart from their relative economic strength, they are written in Vietnamese, The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

The Viet Herald Daily News joined four other daily Vietnamese newspapers with its launch on July 4, with around 12,000 copies, as well as a number of weeklies and magazines and radio and television stations that serve the county's approximate 150,000 strong Vietnamese-American community.
While all five of the Vietnamese-language papers are small, the largest, Nguoi Viet Daily News, has a circulation of 18,000 and a staff of 50. And although they are not unaffected by the global economic slowdown, all five are successful and have continued to run at a profit. One resident told the LA Times he reads Vietnamese papers to find out what is happening in Vietnam.

"I think of us as a connector," Anh Do, vice president of Nguoi Viet, told the LA Times. "The coverage is very intimate."

Jeffrey Brody, a journalism professor at Cal State Fullerton, said the localised, niche market "gives the community exactly what it needs, in terms of news of its homeland and news of the community itself. You can't get that from TV or magazines from the mainstream press."