New York, NY, December 18, 2025 – Fifty-one ethnic and community media outlets, who publish in 14 different languages, have issued an urgent appeal to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, calling for the immediate restoration of city advertising commitments that have collapsed under the Adams administration. The group, coordinated by the Center for Community Media (CCM) at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and URL Media, warns that the ethnic and community media ecosystem cannot survive another four years of neglect from City Hall.
“Ethnic and community media do more than report news,” the letter states. “We interpret public policy for immigrant neighborhoods, connect residents to services, and build trust as AI and algorithms create misinformation havoc. Information gaps in this city can quickly become life-threatening divides.”
At the center of the concerns is Local Law 83 (LL83), a 2021 mandate requiring all city departments and agencies to spend at least 50% of their advertising budgets with community and ethnic media. Prior to that, 82% of the city’s $18 million annual ad budget went to large mainstream outlets, leaving just 18% for media serving immigrant and working communities, based on research conducted by CCM.
“Local Law 83 went a long way in helping small family owned community publishers stay buoyant in an era where sustainability is a dire concern due to shrinking institutional funding opportunities and outsized competition by social media and big tech advertising platforms,” said Vania Andre, publisher of The Haitian Times. Ethnic and community media outlets reach wide audiences across New York City, including serving information in dozens of languages other than English.
According to Comptroller Brad Lander’s office, city advertising spending fell by 84% after LL83 took effect. In 2024, just $7.2 million was spent on ethnic and community media across all city agencies, with no transparency regarding how contracts were awarded.
“For those of us publishing in this space, this isn’t an abstract compliance issue,” says S. Mitra Kalita, publisher of Epicenter NYC and CEO of URL Media, a multiplatform network representing three dozen outlets primarily serving communities of color. “It’s the difference between being able to maintain multilingual coverage of an election, or not. It is the difference between whether immigrant elders hear about a benefit in the paper they actually read, or not. It’s the difference between some of us as ethnic and community media being able to exist, or not.”
The letter’s 51 signatories call on Mayor-elect Mamdani to restore advertising spending, ensure transparency in contract awards and recognize that effective policy implementation depends on trusted information reaching diverse communities. It also urges the incoming administration to seize the opportunity to reverse the damage before taking office and ensure city advertising reaches the outlets that serve hard-to-reach New Yorkers.