Viet Mercury  Viet Mercury () was a Vietnamese-language newspaper serving the Vietnamese American community in San Jose and the surrounding Silicon Valley area in California. It was published weekly by the "San Jose Mercury News" from 1999 to 2005; it also published daily for a time. It was the first Vietnamese-language newspaper published by an English-language daily, as well as the first non-Hispanic ethnic newspaper published by a major American company. Along with the Spanish-language , it was one of two non-English weekly newspapers published by the "Mercury News". "Viet Mercury" was written in Vietnamese. Between 15% and 20% of "Viet Mercury"s stories also ran in English in the "Mercury News", half were translated from wire reports, and original reporting by the paper's staff accounted for the rest of the stories. "Viet Mercury" adhered to mainstream journalistic standards. Its reports avoided taking sides on contentious issues, in contrast to the community-owned papers, which often engaged in advocacy journalism. Like English-language publications, it referred to the former South Vietnamese capital as "Ho Chi Minh City" rather than "Saigon". Whereas community-owned papers' advertisers were mostly Vietnamese-owned businesses, "Viet Mercury" attracted non-Vietnamese-owned businesses through bundled deals that also included space in the "Mercury News" and . Web banners were also available on the VietMercury.com website. The September 3, 1999, issue was 176 pages long, 80% of it taken up by advertising. An issue in March 2000 was nearly 200 pages long, 75% of it advertising. In the 1990s, Santa Clara County was home to some 120,000 Vietnamese Americans, who owned over 5,000 businesses. The greater San Francisco Bay Area was even more Vietnamese speakers, one of the largest concentrations in the United States. A two-year-long market study sponsored by Knight Ridder found that 58% of Vietnamese-American newspaper readers preferred to read stories in Vietnamese instead of English. Another study put this figure higher, at 93%. Other research found that Vietnamese residents of San Jose read three or four newspapers per day. In 1998, there were 14 local Vietnamese newspapers, four of them publishing daily. During this time, the "San Jose Mercury News" expanded its coverage of the area's ethnic communities, to national acclaim, hiring Vietnamese-speaking reporters for the first time. "Mercury News" articles on Vietnamese American topics were regularly translated and republished in Vietnamese-language newspapers nationwide.