Our Mission

Ethnic Media Services, a nonprofit news and communications agency, works to strengthen the capacity of ethnic news media outlets to serve as vital sources of news, information, civic engagement and advocacy for underserved and often isolated immigrant and ethnic minority audiences.

EMS counts over 380 news outlets in California, our home base, and over 3,000 ethnic news outlets nationwide, including veteran print, radio and TV outlets as well as newer online platforms and podcasts.

As fake news proliferates, we provide a hub-and-spoke model for distributing accurate information, news, opinion and analysis, AP style, through our ethnic media syndicate. EMS uses the same model to bring greater equity and inclusion to government and philanthropic public awareness/education advertising campaigns.

Partnering with ethnic media, our goal is to:

• 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

EMS was launched in 2018 by Sandy Close and several of her colleagues after the closure in 2017 of New America Media (NAM), which Close founded and ran for 25 years. NAM was the country’s first and largest association of ethnic news media. EMS continues that tradition.

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 News 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.
• Providing state and regional directories of ethnic media that strengthen the sector’s sustainability by expanding its access to public sector investments.
• Coordinating social media (Facebook | X | LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTok | YouTube) and social 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 innovative communications projects that reach isolated ethnic minority groups that deepen their engagement with and amplify their voice in the public realm.
• Organizing Expo and Awards programs that celebrate the best of the ethnic media sector and honor their role as critical communicators.
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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.