People

Canadian Paper Tiger:
Malaysia-born Sikh-Canadian Harbinder Singh Sewak

by FRANKIE D'CRUZ

 

 

 

 

Standing on his penthouse balcony overlooking the evergreen 400 hectare oasis known as Vancouver’s Stanley Park, Harbinder Singh Sewak talks intensely into his Blackberry phone.

"Okay-lah, when do we start?” he barks into the wireless world, retaining a linguistic caboose that hints at his origins.

“Great ... see you soon ... then we will go eat some satay.”

With that, the affable publisher has concluded a unique deal with Vancouver’s two daily newspapers to carry his Asian Pacific Post and South Asian Post weeklies to the homes of their mainstream subscribers.

Born and raised in the tin mine town of Tanjung Tualang in Perak, Malaysia, Harbinder, now 46, is making his mark as a dynamic force in Canada’s newspaper world.

“It wasn’t easy but we have come a long way,” said Harbinder, who founded the Asian Pacific Post in 1993 on little more than a dream.

At a time when newspaper barons are fighting to correct declining circulations by turning to digital alternatives, Harbinder is plugging ahead with his print products, forming unique alliances to increase the reach of his boutique periodicals.

“I have ink in my blood,” confides the maverick entrepreneur.

Harbinder arrived in Canada from his native Malaysia in the early 90s, by way of Bangkok, where he ran a clothing business, New Zealand, where he lived with the native Maoris as a fruit picker, and after backpacking through Europe.

“I wanted to see the world and my dad was very supportive.”

In Tanjung Tualang, Harbinder’s dad, Sardar Sewa Singh, was a dredge master with six children in a British-run tin mine. He was the youngest dredge master in Malaysia and the first Sikh to hold that position.

Harbinder’s grandfather, Sardar Balwant Singh - aka Panjang (he was a seven-footer) - is also enshrined in the annals of Malaysia’s tin-mining industry for his engineering reforms on the mechanical behemoths that were once the economic lifeline of the country.

Beginning of a Dream

Growing up, young Harbinder’s daily routine included a sojourn at the colonial clubhouse set up for the British employees and senior local staff.

“I would follow my father and grandfather to the club and grab the The Times and The Guardian,” Harbinder recalls from his penthouse perch above Canada’s most vibrant city.

That Fleet Street journalism left an indelible mark on the young Harbinder, who decided that his life path would not be covered in tin, but awash in printer’s ink.

He joined his family in Toronto after his global escapades and later moved to Vancouver to assess the city on the edge of the Pacific, which was then taking on a very Asian personality.

Riding on the coattails of Expo 86, Vancouver was attracting the best and brightest from Asia, and its unprecedented multicultural growth provided fertile ground for the seeds of Harbinder’s newspaper dreams.

The Vision

“I did not like what I saw in terms of ethnic newspapers here then ... they were narrowly focused and the publishers seemed to have agendas rooted in partisan politics which they had brought with them from their homelands,” he says.

“The mainstream just ignored these publications, and advertisers were not seeing the potential of this market because they could not read the papers in Hindi, Mandarin or Tagalog.”

Harbinder’s plan was simple.

He would create a broad-based, English-language newspaper that would bring contextual geo-political news to newly arrived immigrants in Vancouver, while highlighting local issues that affected their diverse communities.

“I wanted news that would reflect the needs of the vibrant Asian community,” he said. “I wanted the mainstream to understand the Asian community’s needs and wants.”

Obstacle Turned Opportunity

In Vancouver, as he established himself, Harbinder met Province deputy editor-in-chief and former New Straits Times journalist Fabian Dawson, and told him of his plan.

“I told him to get serious when he came to see me ... his experience was reading newspapers, not running them,” says Dawson.

“He said the mainstream newspapers were just covering the bus crashes and the elephant stampedes ... Nobody was covering the news that mattered, telling people what was going on back home and reminding them why they left the country and how it’s doing now.

“I said good luck and sent him on his way,” Dawson recalls.

But Harbinder saw that obstacle as an opportunity.

He persuaded Dawson to become his editorial consultant, and set up a makeshift newsroom in the basement of his new home in East Vancouver.

The tenacious publisher went to night school to get layout skills and got his friends to proofread the newspaper by paying them with home-cooked meals.

“He did everything from gathering the content, reporting, layout and distribution ... it was quite amazing, actually,” Dawson recalls.

Tale of Two Papers

Harbinder’s original newspaper in Vancouver was called the Southeast Asian Post. In 2001, he changed the masthead to Asian Pacific Post and set up newspaper boxes across the city.

It was a watershed moment in the local media industry, as no ethnic newspaper had ventured into newspaper boxes to compete with the more established publications.

Today, the strikingly white Asian Pacific Post newspaper boxes are found in every corner of downtown Vancouver, some with promotional Tourism Malaysia stickers.

In 2003, the Asian Pacific Post won the prestigious Jack Webster Award for excellence in community reporting, thrusting the newspaper into the mainstream media consciousness.

Gudrun Will, a Vancouver media commentator, says the Asian Pacific Post has hit a level of professionalism mostly unmatched by the little-league, smaller-format ethnic press, which generally seems run by semi-amateurs.

She described it as being colourful yet serious, delivering news to Indonesians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Japanese and Filipinos as well as Chinese, Sikhs and Indians.

The Asian Pacific Post’s take-no-prisoners editorials, which do not hesitate to berate Canada’s newcomers when necessary, have also begun to catch the attention of other local media commentators and advertisers.

Readers of Vancouver’s Georgia Straight, the 30-year-old popular weekly arts and entertainment magazine, voted the Asian Pacific Post as the best English Language Ethnic Media in Metro Vancouver, population 2.1 million.

Peter Worthington, Canada’s veteran political pundit, congratulated Harbinder’s editorial nerve in a recent column, saying: “It’s an attitude the rest of Canada’s (North America’s) mainstream media might emulate, had they the courage.”

Moving from strength to strength, Harbinder recently launched the weekly South Asian Post, to target Western Canada’s South Asian population.

“This paper will not only be a reflection of what’s going on in the community, but be a vehicle of social change for [Sikh-Canadians and others from the sub-continent],” says Harbinder, whose forefathers are from Punjab.

The paper’s stories on India’s abandoned brides, highlighting the scandal of Indians returning home to marry women for their dowries and leaving them to lives of misery, have triggered several international initiatives to stop the social scourge.

Beyond Newspapers

Harbinder has helped set up a foundation in Punjab that works with agencies across India and Interpol to track the guilty men.

He is also planning a web portal with an active database of the offenders, allowing women to check on a possible fraudulent fiancé, and to share their experiences.

Another high-profile story that Harbinder’s South Asian paper continues to cover is that of Jaswinder “Jassi” Kaur Sidhu, a Vancouver-area beautician whose murder seven years ago was allegedly orchestrated by her mother and uncle after she married a man they considered undesirable.

Harbinder’s website, www.justice forjassi.com, featuring archived stories on this issue, has a petition demanding her killers be brought to justice. The petition recently caught the attention of America’s NBC newsmagazine Dateline, which sent a team to Vancouver to feature the case.

This month, one of India’s premier news agencies, Indo-Asian News Service (IANS), has inked a deal with Harbinder to form a partnership that will feed Canada’s voracious appetite for news from South Asia.

“The South Asian Post provides us with an excellent media platform to reach out to the ethnic communities in Western Canada,” says Shibi Alex Chandy, editor-publishing with IANS.

Bruce Shepherd, business development manager for the Vancouver Sun and The Province, commenting on the distribution alliance with Vancouver’s top dailies, says the Asian Pacific Post and South Asian Post provide unique platforms for advertisers to reach an influential consumer market.

The New Mainstream

A believer in harnessing the energies of individuals and parallel businesses, Harbinder is planning a separate publication for the Filipino community in Canada - Canada’s third largest immigration group.

In a highly centralised industry with heavy monopolistic values, Harbinder’s newspapers are providing voices for Canada’s new immigrants.

“We believe that multiculturalism is the new mainstream,” he says, excusing himself to take another phone call.

This time it is a call from his downtown Vancouver office, which employs about 20 people. “Really? That’s a good deal ... we can work on that.”

The tireless paper tiger from Malaysia is on the prowl again.

 

 

The author is the former news editor of The Malay Mail/ New Straits Times and helped set up The Leader, a free newspaper in the 1990s. This piece was first published in 2008. Edited for sikhchic.com.

[Courtesy: The Star]

April 15,  2012

 

 

 

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