In March 2020, the iconic India Abroad magazine, which had served the Indian-American diaspora since 1970, shut down as the pandemic disrupted the ad revenue flow that had kept print publications – both large and small – afloat. The pandemic marked a turning point in the newspaper industry’s future, which has never really recovered from its impact – most recently, the LA Times laid off 13% of its newsroom. Declining ad sales rang a death knell across the community media landscape as ethnic and local newspaper outlets faced a do-or-die moment for survival.
At India Currents in the Bay Area, it triggered the transformation from print into a fully digital non-profit news outlet, a brand new avatar supported by grant funding and reader donations. Other ethnic and local media outlets that did not reinvent themselves sank, leaving behind news deserts across the country – a trend that continues to persist.
Local media is on the brink of collapse
A study by researchers at Northwestern University’s Medill School paints a sobering picture. It has found that the U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers since 2005. The loss of local newspapers accelerated in 2023, to an average of 2.5 per week in 2023, up from two per week in 2022. Of the 3,143 counties in the U.S., 204 counties have no local media outlet.
This map shows the distribution of ethnic media across the U.S.
Indian-American news outlets
Americans of Indian descent are the fastest-growing Asian population in the U.S., according to new data released from the 2020 Census, increasing by over 50% to 4,397,737 between 2010 and 2020. But only 78 media outlets exist that serve the surging Indian American population, according to Kavita Rajagopalan of the Asian Media Initiative at the Center for Community Media at CUNY.
Indian American publications cluster on the east and west coasts, with a smattering of outlets in the southern states, she said. The entire midwest “where we know large populations of Indian Americans exist, remains underserved.”
Larger media publications affected
The blight isn’t limited to small publications alone. It’s spreading to the bigger players in the industry as well.
In the middle of January of this year, the Los Angeles Times announced that it planned to let go of more than 100 employees, which would cut its editorial staff by 20 percent.
This staff pruning is one of the biggest since it was founded 143 years ago, in 1881.
Its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a tech billionaire, said that the cuts were needed because the paper could no longer afford to lose up to $40 million annually without pumping up its revenues from its two streams: advertisers and readers.
Media companies in crisis
The Associated Press reported that other media companies have been hit by similar crises. They include the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and Vox Media.
At a Feb. 2 EMS briefing on what’s at stake for ethnic media, Ryan Adam, Vice President of Government and Public Affairs of the Toronto Star, Canada’s biggest daily, said, “This just goes to show that having a benevolent billionaire owner isn’t enough” to lift the newspaper industry out of life support. “That’s because the business model of journalism in the modern context is broken.”
He spoke about what Canada is doing to fix what he called a failure of the free market essentially.
Following in the footsteps of Australia, in June of 2023, Canada enacted a law—the Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18—which will require two of the biggest tech giants, Google and Meta, to pay local media outlets for all the journalism content that appears on their platforms.
California lawmakers take steps
Taking a page of out the Canadian book, state lawmakers in California have made a similar move.
Last year, state lawmakers proposed the California Journalism Preservation Act, also known as Assembly Bill 866, which would compel tech behemoths to pay a “fee” to media outlets each time their content was posted on their digital platforms (which, of course, also sell advertising, alongside content.)
That fee would make up for the ad revenue that a media outlet lost even though it created that content merely because its content ran on different platforms, such as Google, Facebook and/or Instagram. Publishers would need to invest 70 percent of the fee back into either paying journalists more and/or hiring more editorial staff.
Keeping journalism alive
Steven Waldman, founder of Rebuild Local News, suggested a different approach: to get the government involved in the effort to keep local journalism alive.
One of those ways is to get the government to advertise in community media, he said.
In 2020, the City University of New York’s Center for Community Media (or CCM) launched the Advertising Boost Initiative. The program, now in its fourth year, asks New York City government agencies to spend 50 percent of their ad dollars on ethnic and community media outlets (and not just on big media brands and social media.) In June of 2021, the New York City mayor’s office established the Office of Ethnic and Community Media, which is the first such office in the country.
“We’re working with [the City University of New York] to try to replicate that model around the country,” said Waldman.
Tax credits can help
Another way that the government can shore up local media is by offering tax credits. A federal bill called the Local Journlism Sustainibilty Act proposes three such tax credits.
- Tax credit to the reader. Readers would be eligible for a five-year tax credit up to $250 per year, which would cover 80 percent of the subscription costs in the first year and 50 percent of subscription costs in each of the subsequent four years.
- Tax credit to hire journalists. Local media would get a tax credit for hiring and/or retaining editorial staff.
- Tax credit to local businesses. Businesses with less than 1,000 employees would get a tax credit of up to $5,000 to spend on ads in local media.
“It’s a very creative approach,” said Waldman. “Because the tax break is going to restaurants and dry cleaners and grocery stores, only if they advertise in local media. It’s also interesting at another level because it doesn’t involve someone in the government, making decisions about who should get a grant or not.”
Helping local media survive
Such incentives will come as welcome news (pun not intended) to someone like Martha Diaz Aszkenazy, owner and publisher of the San Fernando Sun, a publication that has been running continuously since 1904.
“I’m hopeful that we will survive, partly because we are hyperlocal. Nobody’s here. We’re hitting it where they’re not. So, I think if we can get just a little help, you know, a little bit of money,” Aszkenazy.
Photo by Korie Cull on Unsplash
Photo by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash