This article introduces a new NPQ series titled The New Asian Diaspora Media: Defending Democracy Locally and Globally. Co-produced with Kavitha Rajagopalan, who directs a program on community journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY), this series highlights stories of how different Asian American communities are using grassroots digital media to meet their communities’ needs for trustworthy in-language information amid a media environment distorted by rampant disinformation.

In 1883, a young New Yorker named Wong Chin Foo founded a newspaper called The Chinese American—a term he coined. The newspaper embodied and disseminated his deeply held dream: that the vast and growing immigrant population from China naturalize as citizens like he had, becoming, in turn, Americans.

Today, as the United States undergoes its latest wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the role of AAPI community journalism is more important than ever.

Ironically, the Chinese Exclusion Act had become law just a year before, on May 6, 1882. The law barred all immigration from China for 10 years and ushered in a period of exclusion that culminated in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which banned Asian immigration to the United States entirely. This era of Asian exclusion came at the crest of a wave of immigration from across Asia, driven in part by US imperialism which led to, among other territorial acquisitions, the annexation of the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii in 1898.

The Chinese American formed part of a larger trend. Indeed, immigrants from Asia and displaced colonial subjects from across the Pacific had begun to found their own newspapers and magazines in the 1850s, a period marked by the explosion of popular print journalism and the emergence of the Black press. In the 20th century, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) immigrants would also create their own radio and television stations.

This news media ecosystem for and by AAPI, which I explore in depth in my 2024 report, AAPI News Media: Origins and Futures, has continued to evolve—and push for AAPI participation in US democracy—through repeated eras of discrimination and xenophobia.

Today, as the United States undergoes its latest wave of anti-immigrant sentiment, the role of AAPI community journalism is more important than ever.

A History of Community Resistance

As early as the mid-19th century, at least 26 Chinese-language newspapers were published in eight cities across the United States. These were soon joined by hundreds of other Asian American community newspapers, published by Japanese labor leaders in Hawaii, exiled Armenian politicians in Massachusetts, Korean church leaders in Los Angeles, Indian independence activists in San Francisco, and Filipino colonial subjects.

A core and often overlooked constituent part of the so-called ethnic press, these Asian American community newspapers helped their communities to organize against labor exploitation, discrimination, and racist violence—and to connect their colonized and displaced people.

How this response occurred differed. Many Chinese American newspapers from San Francisco to New York advocated for assimilation as a remedy to the anti-Chinese discrimination and violence—including mass lynchings. Later, Filipino American newspapers pushed back against racist incitement in White-led local newspapers.

Other communities found indirect ways to organize against harmful anti-immigrant policies. For example, after its publishers had been arrested and detained in concentration camps during World War II, Japanese American newspapers in Los Angeles, which today remain among the oldest and longest-running Asian American community newspapers, made sports the crux around which they reconstituted their audiences and rebuilt their community.

Early Asian American community newspapers certainly served their local communities where they were, but even in their earliest iterations were deeply embedded in diasporic politics and cultures. Two Lebanese American brothers in New York City’s Little Syria, where Khalil Gibran wrote and published The Prophet, innovated the linotype to produce Arabic letters, fostering a global Arabic-language literary renaissance.

Community newspapers became the main platforms of displaced Armenian political parties fleeing persecution under the Ottoman Empire, or of Indian political parties founded to advocate across the global Indian diaspora for armed resistance to British imperial rule.

An AAPI Community Media Revival

Many of the earlier community newspapers, and the histories they documented, have been lost. But in the wake of the post-1965 immigration wave after the United States reopened to immigrants from Asia and elsewhere, a new network of AAPI community media has emerged. Today, nearly 700 outlets serve audiences in 56 languages, as shown in the AAPI Media Map and Directory that I compiled in 2023.

Asian Americans and their community news outlets remain as engaged as their forebears in the cultures and politics of their homelands and elsewhere, but digital space has amplified—and complicated—what this engagement looks like, just as it has blurred the lines between local, national, and international news.

The rise of digital media and its impact on how diaspora communities produce culture and politics—and respond to the twin threats of climate change and authoritarianism—has transformed Asian American community journalism.

Today, in addition to the in-language and hyperlocal immigrant community newspapers that comprised the traditional ethnic press, Asian American communities also produce a range of digital publications, as well as streaming radio or video published exclusively on in-language messaging apps.

The variety of AAPI community news outlets is broad. They range from oral history and community-based digital archives to newsletters covering historically oppressed minorities within Asian immigrant and Pasifika (Pacific Island) communities. Additional AAPI media include literary magazines dedicated to preserving endangered languages or featuring poets and novelists displaced by war; podcasts for multiracial or LGBTQ+ Asian Americans; specialty glossy magazines, such as Punjabi trucking industry or Iranian Jewish bridal magazines; and investigative and human rights–documenting projects.

And despite the ongoing loss of revenue in the community news sector as a whole, this ecosystem is not just diversifying, it’s growing—more than 100 outlets in the AAPI Media Map and Directory have been founded within the last five years.

Negotiating a Brave New Digital World

But AAPI community media outlets must compete and participate in an increasingly complex digital landscape. While Asian Americans report that in-language media are their most trusted sources of information, they are just as likely to consume news and entertainment broadcast via satellite or streamed over the Internet from Asia than they are to turn to locally produced community media, and can engage in their own languages on social media platforms owned and operated from overseas, such as WeChat, Weibo, KakaoTalk, or LINE.

On digital platforms, community-centered journalism must compete with state media and influencers, including so-called self-media accounts that masquerade as news outlets. Furthermore, local community journalists say they are subjected to digital harassment campaigns, often unleashed by overseas government-run trolling and cyber troop operations.

The diasporic nature of the production and consumption of news in the digital age likewise has transformative impacts even on the legacy ethnic press. With the decline of press freedom in Vietnam, Vietnamese news audiences are beginning to turn to Vietnamese-language newspapers in the diaspora for news, which must often be reported by people with no official permission or credentials—often with tourist visas or other irregular immigration status in Vietnam.

Local South Asian and Southeast newspaper audiences in US cities say they routinely lose access to their local digital newspapers when countries of origin shut down the internet as a tool of repression, cutting newspapers off from their back-office teams, as was the case in Bangladesh during the 2024 student protests.

And small local news outlets often feel pressured to produce multiple digital products, including digital editions of print publications as well as streaming audio or video. In addition, they need to maintain their websites, produce new mobile apps, and manage multiple social media accounts, often with skeletal staff and very limited tech capabilities. This raises the risk of manipulation and theft, which in turn threatens credibility in an audience with divided attention.

Within the United States itself, Asian American community news media publishers say they struggle to serve their increasingly polarized communities. A growing number of publishers say they face boycotts, lawsuits, and pressure campaigns from community activists seeking to influence their coverage.

There’s more. Formerly independent Hong Kong community news outlets have had to sign cooperative agreements with Chinese state media outlets. In the Indian American community, many media outlets are funded or otherwise aligned with pro–Indian government political organizations, which seek to leverage financial influence to shape community news outlets as political influence platforms.

Meanwhile, in a political climate that has greatly impacted coverage of Palestinian American communities, Arab American community outlets say that they face dramatic declines in advertising and funding, as well as harassment over their reporting.

Building the Digital Voice of a Fragmented Community

How do people address these challenges? This series offers a window into the complexity and necessity of AAPI community journalism in the digital age, illuminating the mechanisms that community-based, in-language publishers have used to engage and serve communities threatened by changing immigration policies, health disparities, transnational disinformation, and historic conflict.

The stories are wide-ranging. Kishor Panthi describes how the New York City-based news service Khasokhas has responded to immigration enforcement rumors and realities in a vulnerable and growing Nepali American community. Leezel Tanglao illuminates how the COVID-era fact-checking project Tayo has grown into a data-driven resource advancing Filipino American public health.

The team behind the Chinese-language fact-checking outlet Piyaoba explain how their publication navigates digital harassment, repression from both China and the United States, and disinformation campaigns to combat polarization in Chinese American communities. Indah Nuritasari, publisher of Indonesian Lantern, describes how she earned the trust of the historically persecuted minority Chinese Indonesian community to promote literacy and civic engagement through relevant local news.

Asian American community journalism stands at both a crossroads and a precipice, as it seeks to inform and engage a community in need of relevant, in-language information, and to connect and organize a divided community.

The series concludes with an exploration of how a new diasporic journalistic ecosystem is emerging to combat threats to safety and democracy around the world, authored by a three-person team of scholars on race and digital democracy—Rachel Kuo, Sarah Nguyễn, and Christine Phan.

Asian America is an increasingly complex and fragmented place. In the United States, there are an estimated 25 million Asian Americans, roughly 60 percent of whom are of Chinese, Filipino, or Indian descent, while Vietnamese Americans are the fourth-largest group, at about 2.3 million people. Asian Americans include both the fastest-growing undocumented populations, as well as the highest rates of permanent residency and naturalization, the widest in-demographic health and wealth disparities, and histories of painful conflicts and deep internal oppressions.

At the same time, the US government is reviving its program to surveil Chinese American communities. Moreover, at least 22 states have passed legislation to ban property ownership by some immigrant groups, and changing immigration policy targets Muslim Asian Americans as well as Asian immigrants seeking asylum, refuge, or other forms of amnesty.

In this environment, Asian American community journalism stands at both a crossroads and a precipice, as it seeks to inform and engage a community in need of relevant, in-language information, and to connect and organize a divided community.

Even as the future of US multiracial democracy remains uncertain, a look at how Asian Americans have used their community journalism in the past can help us understand its potential to help Asian American immigrant communities stay informed and safe today.

But while they have powerful new digital tools for reaching and engaging audiences and reporting on transformative events in their homelands, AAPI community news media also face profound press freedom and safety risks, as well as pervasive disinformation and deepening polarization in digital space and declining revenues, all of which threaten their core mission of fostering civic engagement in the immigrant communities they serve. AAPI community media, in short, must negotiate difficult terrain.