The San Jose Mercury News, part of the second largest newspaper chain in the United States, has begun to publish a Vietnamese language newspaper. This has produced some feelings of pride in the community, and also some fears that the daily will use its size and muscle to snuff out existing ethnic publications. PNS commentator Nguyen Xuan Nam is editor of CaliToday, a bilingual (English and Vietnamese) periodical published in San Jose.

The San Jose Mercury News, the largest newspaper in California's second largest metropolitan area, has given birth to a Vietnamese language publication, the Viet Mercury.

Reaction in the Vietnamese community has been mixed.

On the positive side, this is taken as a sign that the Vietnamese language is prospering. Many in the community were worried that Vietnamese culture and tradition would be "Americanized" and disappear in the melting pot. In fact, there are signs that the reverse is true: each week new books are published in our community, Vietnamese language radio is also expanding rapidly, and Vietnamese newspapers also grow in number each year.

And now an American newspaper is hiring Vietnamese to publish a newspaper. This suggests our language will survive and prosper.

The Mercury News' venture also indicates the Vietnamese community is doing well. Though we have no statistics, an educated guess is that around 5,000 Vietnamese-owned establishments are operating in Santa Clara County, and about half of them market via Vietnamese language media. Our sheer number -- more than 100,000 in the county -- has important political and economic consequences. Politicians aggressively "targeted" this population in the last election. Vietnamese led in the number of homebuyers last year. Vietnamese spend an estimated $ 1.5 billion a year.

So the birth of the Viet Mercury validates our growing prosperity as well as our ability to retain our own language.

Yet, the first issue of the Viet Mercury brought out quite a bit of negative opinion as well.

One point of view holds that the Mercury News is trying to "save" itself -- a recent Wall Street Journal article noted that America's top 10 newspapers have lost subscribers in considerable numbers. Many read their news on the internet via websites that belong to well known newspapers or news services.

The papers also face dwindling revenues as large companies divert advertising expenditures to the Internet. Newspaper publishers are worried about this cycle: a smaller readership means newspaper ads have less effect, and that means the price of ads must go down. That is why a few newspapers try to retain readers by lowering the subscription price and by working actively on the Internet.

In this view Viet Mercury is a strategy to increase the Mercury News' exposure and keep its advertising effective -- their answer to the problem facing all mainstream newspapers.

Ironically, many Vietnamese already buy the Mercury News to follow news of their own community and, since the paper has an office in Vietnam, of Vietnam itself. So the introduction of the Viet Mercury may very well mean a dramatic decline in the Vietnamese readership of the San Jose Mercury news -- a readership the Mercury News has worked hard to attract.

The biggest stir the birth of the Viet Mercury is creating in the community is over its advertising prices. An article in the Vietnamese language Gia Dinh newspaper, based in San Jose, calculated the Viet Mercury's operating cost -- considering the size of its staff and 20,000 copy press run -- at $300 a page. Yet the Viet Mercury's ad rate is only $90 per page during its first three month "promotion," a much lower rate than that charged by most Vietnamese language newspapers, which publish far fewer copies per issue.

Many Vietnamese language newspapers think this is unfair competition, an effort to take over the market by cutting prices, a move to eliminate weaker competitors.

In legal terms, "price dumping," or "price discrimination" describes the situation where a firm sells its product for different prices in different markets even though production costs are not significantly different.

Some classic cases of price dumping include television and electronic manufacturers, selling at prices below production cost, to wrest the market from their competitors. America has long considered price dumping unethical and a violation of anti trust law.

For ethnic newspapers -- Vietnamese or Spanish for example -- the impact of a mainstream paper like the Viet Mercury offering ads at prices well below what its smaller ethnic competitors can charge can be devastating. In the name of offering a voice of the community, the mainstream paper snuffs out voices of the community.

I truly hope that this fear among Vietnamese newspaper people and our community representatives prove unfounded.