A recent survey of the national minority press in Bulgaria highlights the ways that such media can help mobilize ethnic communities and the contribution they can make to the integration of these groups into the broader society. The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, together with a Bulgarian survey agency, last week published the results of a survey of the ethnic press in Bulgaria. That survey included 19 ethnic publications--seven Romany, three Armenian, two Wallachian and Romanian, two Jewish, two Russian, two Turkish, and one Macedonian--for the period from May 1999 to May 2000. Only one, "Evrena," the newspaper of the Armenian community, was self-supporting. And one large minority, the Turkish community, generally relied on publications from abroad rather than generating its own output.

The authors of the survey reached three general conclusions, each of which appears to be applicable to the ethnic minority press in other countries as well. First, the authors found that the publications of those groups that are the most integrated into Bulgarian society had the largest printruns per capita. Publications directed at the Jewish community, for example, generally produce one issue a month for every two Jews among the population, whereas there is only one issue of a Romany newspaper for every 10 Romany citizens each month. This "circulation paradox," the authors of the survey suggest, reflects cultural differences among the groups and also the important role that the ethnic press can and does play in helping integrate communities into the broader society. Some members of the dominant community view the ethnic press as a threat to national unity, but the survey suggests that it plays the opposite role. As the authors of the study note, the prevailing opinion among ethnic groups in Bulgaria is that the ethnic publications directed at them should be issued in both Bulgarian and those groups' native tongues, an arrangement that would appear to promote national consolidation.

Second, the survey's authors concluded that the newspapers of such minorities will need subsidies from either community groups or the government in order to continue. Because those groups are small, the publications seldom are able to attract the necessary advertising or subscription income. Even the one self- supporting newspaper in the survey was able to cover only 80 percent of its costs through advertising and newspaper sales. Consequently, the national government and other institutions of the majority national community may have a compelling interest in providing subsidies to ensure that the newspapers of ethnic minority communities will not only continue to appear but even gain in influence. And third, the authors of the survey pointed out that those communities that do not have a strong domestically produced ethnic press are more likely than others to turn to publications from their co-ethnics abroad. They cited the case of Bulgaria's 800,000 Turks, the ethnic minority that in the past has presented some of the biggest challenges to Sofia. The Turkish-language paper with the largest circulation has a printrun of only 7,000, "too small," the authors of the survey argue, for the large community it serves. As a result, ethnic Turks in Bulgaria turn to "Yumit" and "Zaman," subsidiaries of Turkish newspapers produced in Turkey. The survey's compilers noted that Bulgarian Turks accept these newspapers from abroad "as ethnic publications, " but precisely because the focus of these newspapers is on Turkey, rather than on Bulgaria, such media outlets may promote separatist or even irredentist feelings rather than generate the kind of integrationist feelings that the domestic ethnic press appears to do. Bulgaria is far from the only country in Eastern Europe and in the post-Soviet area that is wrestling with the problems of ethnic minorities and the ethnic press. The conclusions of this survey suggest that other governments, some of which have been openly hostile to the non-majority press, may want to reconsider their views about the role that minority media play.