In the 1990s, the "Mercury News" expanded its coverage of the area's ethnic communities, to national acclaim, hiring Vietnamese-speaking reporters for the first time. In 1994, it became the first of two American dailies to open a foreign bureau in Vietnam after the Vietnam War. A foreign correspondent stationed at the Hanoi bureau held an annual town hall meeting with the Vietnamese-American community in San Jose. Initially, community members staged protests accusing the paper of siding with the Communist government in Vietnam by opening the bureau.