The New York Times Company is planning to launch a weekly newspaper in a largely black community on the east side of Gainesville, Fla., next month, raising concerns among several black journalists and publishers who say that the Gray Lady’s new paper will divert revenue from black owned papers.

Industry watchers said that the paper, which will be called the Gainesville Guardian, comes as part of a broader trend of mainstream media giants wading into ethnic niche markets. Knight Ridder and Tribune Company both recently rolled out Spanish-language newspapers. But by specifically targeting black readers, the Times’ Gainesville venture may be unique, according to media analyst John Morton of Morton Research in Silver Spring, Md. “I offhand can’t think of another conventional newspaper that has created a product oriented to a black population,” Mr. Morton said.

The editor in chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, George Curry, whose service provides wire copy to more than 200 black papers, said that the Times’ venture “is going to divert ads that would have gone to the black media.”

Blacks in the area are already served by the Florida Star, based in Jacksonville, 70 miles northeast of Gainesville, and Mr. Curry said that the Times’ venture could pose a threat to the Star. However, Mr. Morton said that since the Guardian will focus almost exclusively on the 15,000-person East Gainesville community, “it won’t have a big effect on a regional black-oriented newspaper.”

A spokesman for the Times, Toby Usnik, said that the Guardian is “not exclusively tailored to the African-American community.” He said that the paper, which is aiming to release its first issue August 24, “will have everything from news to obituaries to weddings to birth announcements to Little League scores.”

But a wanted ad seeking general assignment reporters for the Guardian that was placed with the National Association of Black Journalists specifically describes the venture as “the first New York Times-owned black newspaper.”

Also, the Times already has a daily newspaper that covers the city, the Gainesville Sun.

In addition to its flagship broadsheet, the Times owns 19 other daily papers, primarily in California, Massachusetts, and the South. Consequently, its new venture could have ripple effects that extend well beyond the northeastern corner of the Sunshine State. “If it’s successful, it might be replicated in other markets where the Times Company has newspapers,” an expert on diversity in the news industry at the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, Richard Prince, said.

The Times has started four weekly newspapers in Florida, although none of them have targeted a minority population. The Guardian will operate out of the offices of the Gainesville Sun.

The director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Alex Jones, said that the Gray Lady should not be criticized simply because it’s entering into competition against existing black-owned outlets. “That would be like saying integration is a bad thing because it destroyed the segregated, black-owned businesses in black parts of town,” he said.

Mr. Jones said that from a journalistic standpoint, “the main point as far as the ethnic press is concerned is not who owns it, but how well they serve the market.”

A former Times corporate development director, Porter Bibb, said that given the small size of the East Gainesville market, the Guardian will do little to reverse the Times’ recent financial woes.

“They should put their effort into a much more propitious business development program, rather than spending time and money on something like the effort in Gainesville,” Mr. Bibb, who is now a managing partner at MediaTech Capital Partners, said.

In a move that is indicative of the growing competition for black readers, Mr. Bibb said his bank – in conjunction with a group of 283 black publishers – is planning to roll out a twice-a-week newspaper targeting a largely black, 18- to 29-year-old audience in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.