New CUNY project highlights prevalence and importance of Ethnic Media

At MIREMS we know the value of ethnic media for organizations and decision makers who want accurate and in-depth insight about diverse communities. Projects like the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s Latino News Media Map are important contributions to raising awareness multilingual media that is receiving timely attention.
 
The Map is an interactive tool and directory of more than 600 Latino news media outlets in the US and Puerto Rico, and is no small feat. The nature of ethnic and multicultural media is that it’s volatile. Many news outlets are often started up out of necessity, by and for their multilingual community, and waves of immigration and changes in the world of news media mean keeping an up-to-date list of these sources is very difficult.
The collection is impressive and will benefit from ongoing community support. Most of these publications and outlets are small operations with little consistent information available: Flipping through the map, the user sees empty fields, which hopefully will be filled by the media outlets themselves. Flipping through mediums, users see first-hand that there are more newspapers and TV outlets than radio stations, blogs, newswires and podcasts. Further research is needed to identify these more elusive sources.
Raising the profile of multilingual and multicultural media as a valuable and unique source of information is important work. It invites more awareness about diverse communities into the public sphere. MIREMS supports any effort to make language barriers more transparent.
MIREMS monitors multilingual media across 30 different languages in the US, Canada and worldwide. Our Canadian project, www.diversityvotes.ca explores the connection between language, community demographics and multilingual/multicultural media and its role in the upcoming 2019 October Federal election in Canada.
 Ethnic media opinion has played an important role in Canadian election processes and campaigns and given the current level of identity politics in the United States, may impact that contest as well.