At an Oct. 28 oversight hearing, City Council members grilled the new director of the Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media (MOECM) about why the office, which is supposed to connect New Yorkers with public services while helping to fund community journalism, had gone months without a director, gone through repeated reorganizations, and suffered shrinking advertising support while city agencies funded influencer campaigns.
Members of the council’s Committee on Governmental Operations, State & Federal Legislation said the drop in city advertising support for ethnic and community media was troubling, since more than 4.1 million city residents get their news from these media sources.
Under Local Law 83 of 2021, NYC mayoral agencies are legally required to spend at least 50% of their annual advertising budget with ethnic and community media outlets.
“I mean, just to be clear, the law was incredibly successful,” Council Speaker Julie Menin told the administration’s witness. “It has now been gutted, so that is why we are having this hearing.”
That witness was Mazin Sidahmed, MOECM’s newly appointed executive director who is a co-founder of the non-profit news site, Documented. Sidahmed was appointed to his position on Sept. 18. Asked during the hearing about staffing for MOECM, he said, “I am the only person on the team,” while promising to hire at least one other person.
Menin asked why the office moved from the Office of Mass Engagement to the mayor’s communications operation after months without a director. Sidahmed responded, “Sorry, I cannot really speak to deliberations that happened before I started.”
“Okay, and you cannot comment on why the office did not have a director for eight months?” Menin asked. “I mean, that is very concerning as well — that no one was running this office while it was under mass engagement for eight months, and no one was running it, and then it was moved again and again with no director until you came on board.”
Sidahmed again replied that he could not answer Menin’s question. “As I said, I cannot really speak to deliberations that happened before I started, but I can say that it is a unique office. … This is the only one of its kind in the nation, and in my conversations upon joining the administration, I did sense a real desire to really get it right and understand what would be needed for this office.”
He also did not have a current citywide advertising total and said he was collecting agency and media buyer record information.
Councilmember Gale Brewer, who chairs the Committee on Governmental Operations, challenged the lag in even basic updates to the office. “I do not mean to be rude,” she told Sidahmed, “but you have to update the website before next year. It still says 2024. I read the whole thing this morning.”
The idea for MOECM grew from the fact that city advertising dollars were in the past rarely spent with smaller media outlets. In 2019, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Executive Order 47 mandated that half of the city’s annual print and digital publication advertising funds be spent with immigrant, neighborhood-specific, or non-English media publications. Local Law 83, passed in June 2021, created the office and expanded coverage to radio and television.
A 2025 CUNY Center for Community Media report found the policy led to more than $72 million being spent with community media over five years. Menin said that it peaked at $23.1 million in 2022 and went down to near $7 million in 2024. The downturn in spending came prior to the Mamdani administration, but publishers said they did not want to continue to see losses in 2026.
“The executive order back in 2019 set the goal of a significant percentage of our ad spending going to ethnic and community media from city agencies, and the purpose there was in part to stabilize the struggling industry,” Councilmember Lincoln Restler said, as he questioned how the city counted its fiscal year 2025 spending. He said $31 million in advertising was reported as going to community and ethnic media, but $18 million was considered out of scope. That meant eligible spending was 24%, not 57%, he argued. Sidahmed said he would review the data and work with the council to clarify how spending should be counted.
Councilmember Althea Stevens asked why African outlets, like Little Africa News, had not received advertising dollars. “I represent one of the largest African communities in the city and they are growing fast. One of the questions that I have is why African outlets such as Little Africa and others have not received any advertising dollars for this year yet.” Sidahmed said he could not explain why agencies had not sent any advertising to them yet but would look into what the office had done previously and prepare a report by the end of the year.
Stevens got upset with that though, and said it was not fair for community media outlets to have to wait. “Because you just started, folks have to wait until the end of the year to figure out how they are supposed to access funds? So how do we ensure that these outlets do not collapse in the meantime?” she asked. “What was the transition like? Because that is unfair — because you just started, everyone has to wait? What does the transition look like? I am confused. Are you the only person there?”
AmNews Publisher Elinor Tatum testified how Local Law 83 is important to the survival of community media, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have been around for 117 years, supporting and reporting on the communities in New York City. When Local Law 83 came about, it was very important to the survival of the Amsterdam News and community media all across New York City. It came at a time where we all needed that support more than I think a lot of us even knew at the time.”
“And over the next few years,” she continued, “it became even more and more apparent how much we needed that support, especially when COVID hit. And then the Adams administration came in, and we saw it weaponized. We saw it used to some people’s advantage and some people’s very much disadvantage … it really was used as a weapon. We saw advertising dwindle; we saw it cut nearly in half.”
The starving of ethnic and community media outlets started before the Mamdani administration, Tatum said. MOECM helps outlets navigate the system but does not place the ads, Tatum added. That work is handled by six advertising agencies with city contracts, she said, and she urged the council to examine their role.
“Those advertising agencies, those six agencies are the ones that I think we really need to be investigating. Because those six advertising agencies are the ones that have the contracts with the city.” Tatum said the agencies don’t take the time to cultivate relationships with small media outlets –– to reach the audiences they are supposed to they “usually go with the lowest hanging fruit, whatever’s easiest for them. And most times that is television and radio. And that’s where, a lot of times, the local press -–– both websites and print media -–– get left out.”
Tatum called for MOECM to be an independent office, with quarterly recipient-level reporting, protections against editorial retaliation, and a review of advertising allocations since Jan. 1.
The hearing also questioned why city payments between $500 to $20,000 were being made to influencers. “Why should taxpayer dollars be used to compensate someone for repeating government talking points when independent neighborhood newspapers are struggling to keep reporters employed?” Councilmember Frank Morano asked. “Taxpayer money is going to influencers. Should not every New Yorker know exactly who is being paid, how much they are receiving, and whether they are disclosing their relationship?”
Sidahmed answered that his focus was on MOECM’s directory of 293 publications: “I cannot speak to how agencies spend their money otherwise, but that is really my goal in this role.”
WBAI Radio general manager Bob Hennelly described free emergency alerts and news as essential services his radio station supplies, and Epicenter NYC publisher S. Mitra Kalita noted that her outlet helped more than 20,000 New Yorkers connect to COVID vaccines. She noted that she had been sounding the alarm about the decline in funding to community media outlets for more than a year.
“I have raised these concerns with council members, mayoral transition committee members, Gov. Hochul’s policy advisors, and members of the state senate and assembly. Last December URL Media, and the Center for Community Media tried to get in front of the issue, and we signed an open letter, signed by 51 outlets publishing in 14 languages, asking the incoming administration to restore spending and transparency.”
“We also made a number of recommendations around some of the issues that have been raised around press passes, access, spending by city-supported institutions on local and ethnic media,” Kalita said. “We laid out quite a number of issues [and] we are still today asking for a functioning, predictable and transparent system.”
