Our Mission

• Build an effective advocacy voice by, for and with ethnic media to help sustain and grow the sector
• Promote inter-ethnic communications through collaborative editorial and social marketing projects
• Expand career paths for ethnic media reporters through reporting fellowships and professional trainings
• Ensure an equitable distribution of ad dollars for the ethnic media’s role in engaging and informing audiences on vital issues
• Strengthen communications between ethnic media and nonprofit advocacy and grassroots service organizations

What We Do

Ethnic Media Services works to enhance the capacity of ethnic news outlets to inform and engage diverse audiences on broader public issues with the goal of building a more inclusive participatory democracy. We do this by:

• Convening roundtable briefings that bring ethnic media together with experts, officials, nonprofit leaders, and advocates to exchange perspectives on urgent issues, generate media coverage and expand cross-cultural and cross-sector communications.
• Organizing professional training and fellowships for ethnic media reporters that expand their knowledge of key issues, connect them to sources and provide financial support for in-depth reporting.
• Coordinating social media and marketing campaigns that enable government agencies, foundations, nonprofits and public affairs firms to customize messaging that resonates with diverse audiences and expands ethnic media’s access to advertising revenue.
• Producing, translating and syndicating multilingual, original news stories to ethnic news media partners on how policy issues impact their audiences.
• Developing communications projects with underserved groups that deepen their engagement with and amplify their voice in the public realm.
• Contact Us

Why Ethnic Media

Ethnic media exploded with growth over the last 40 years, paralleling an unprecedented influx of immigrants from all over the world. By 2009, an estimated 60 million American adults relied on some form of ethnic media — print, online, TV, radio — for news, information and entertainment. In California, over half the state’s new majority of ethnic minorities named an ethnic news source they referenced regularly or occasionally.

Today, like general market media, the ethnic media sector is buffeted by the challenges of the digital era — from the collapse of the advertising model to the explosion of social media. Their survival depends on diverse audiences having somewhere to turn for trusted news, for visibility, for a voice.

Ethnic media will evolve as the communities they serve evolve. Knight Ridder began as a German newspaper and turned into a corporate media giant. In Nashville, the largest Kurdish population outside Kurdistan communicates through WhatsApp on the imam’s iPhone. In Richmond, California, a black news outlet is now bilingual, in Spanish and English, and targets not just one ethnic group but the entire city.

Mainstream media have imagined ethnic media as insular and parochial. What if it’s the other way around? As climate change results in global migration tripling over the next 30 years, the media-serving diaspora populations could become the new mainstream.