Model and Strategy
Ethnic Media Services (EMS) and California Black Media (CBM) are launching a collaborative reporting project that bridges one of the most sensitive but rarely addressed racial fault lines in our society: the chasm between Black and Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities.
Ethnic news outlets – from audio-streamed in-language news programs posted on Facebook or WhatsApp to venerable print and online news platforms and TV broadcasts – are the most trusted source of news and information for fully half of California’s new majority of immigrants and BIPOC populations. How these outlets report on racial differences, misunderstandings and divisions is crucial to how their audiences perceive themselves and each other. News stories that uphold or perpetuate stereotypes of one group by another take root and spread within communities siloed by language, culture, class, and geography.
EMS and CBM will recruit, train and coordinate a cohort of 20 reporters from 10 multi-media AAPI and 10 multi-media Black news outlets to work in pairs to each produce four special reporting projects over the year. The 20 participating outlets will publicize and promote the stories as a joint Black-AAPI newsbeat on race relations, reaching a combined audience of between 3-4 million people. EMS also will syndicate project stories to our national network, providing translations from English to relevant Asian languages and vice versa.
EMS and CBM will expand the model in Year 2 to news outlets serving Latino, Middle Eastern and South Asian audiences – especially recently arrived immigrants and refugee groups who have few reference points for understanding or navigating the complex landscape of race relations in California.
Impact
Ethnic news media’s great strength is that they know, identify with, and define their mission as one of advocacy for the audiences they serve. “We wish to plead our own cause, too long have others spoken for us,” the mission statement of the first African American newspaper in New York in 1827, defines the mission of most ethnic news media today. Their biggest journalistic challenge is to transcend their own cultural and linguistic silos to report on and engage with the wider civic realm.
This project will establish a cohort of Asian and Black reporters who have worked together and are committed to telling stories that reflect the realities of racism in their own and each other’s communities, while facilitating a cross-racial exchange about the issues that divide and could potentially unite them.
The impact of the collaboration will go deeper than the targeted audience reach. Reporters will develop personal relationships with the people and cultures of their assigned communities. Media outlets will also expand editorial perspectives to include voices from other racial groups. The cohort of reporters could serve as emergency responders to cover breaking stories of racial tension or conflict, or interview victims of incidents that were misreported or ignored, offering opportunities for their stories to be told by both Black and AAPI media.
The partnership between EMS and CBM likewise transcends this one initiative. We are working together to build an advocacy voice for ethnic media in the public sector, create business sustainability initiatives that support outlets hit hardest by the pandemic, and expand the sector’s presence in the digital space.
Leadership
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Sandy Close
Founder, EMS
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Jaya Padmanabhan
Director of Programs, EMS
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Regina Brown Wilson
Executive Director, CBM
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Tanu Henry
Managing Editor, CBM