Last Friday night I went to something that seems almost counterintuitive these days given the decline of their industry—a celebration for journalists. The Northern California Ethnic Media Awards, held in San Francisco, honored the various faces and forms of ethnic media outlets—the Sing Tao Daily’s investigation on SRO’s, Alianza’s photo essay on Oaxacan migrants, the Nichi Bei Times full issue on the concept of “mixed race.”

This awards banquet (which has been dubbed the “Ethnic Pulitzer”) was part of a series of regional awards hosted by New America Media (who I work for), which will lead up to a National Ethnic Media Awards event in Atlanta in June.

At a time when the nation’s major newspapers are given the ironic task of covering their own death on their front pages, ethnic media’s role as being both conduits of information and gatekeepers to their community has arrived at a tipping point. Despite the shoe-string budgets, these outlets, through the overlap of several circumstances of history—an economy in peril, the demise of legacy news print, and the demographic shift of the county—are media who’s time has come.

For these journalists, who historically have been regulated to the margins, dismissed by the advertising world, ignored by City Hall press releases, this is the perfect time to throw a party.

It’s not that these outlets aren’t struggling; it’s just that they’re used to it. Most started in living rooms of the publisher’s house, some moved into offices, some didn’t. And while they certainly need resources to put out their bi-weekly paper, or produce their weekly television show, many function more like community organizations rather than follow corporate models.

Gilberto Morales, publisher of one of the most well-established and influential Spanish/English newspapers in the country, El Observador, still can be seen dropping off bundles of his paper around spots in San Jose.

It is this ethic of accessibility and proximity to people’s personal lives that makes the model of ethnic media more important than ever. The country’s financial insecurities have put a premium on information as people try to navigate through the confusion, looking for lifelines and roadmaps. Media that has proven to speak directly to these needs become the lifelines.

And communication devices like these can be more than just service delivery agents, but can also create enlightening journalism as well. The winner of the “Inter-Ethnic” award, Weiwei Ren’s piece “Confronting Chinese-Indian Race Relations in Silicon Valley,” from the Sing Tao Daily, was one of those examples where ethnic media can notice subtleties on the ground that get missed sometimes by the distance of establishment media.

The piece was written in the aftermath of a laidoff Chinese engineer shooting to death three executives in Silicon Valley including his Indian boss, and the reverberations of tension between South Asian and Chinese workers in the tech industry. It was a candid and frank discussion between the two communities who are acutely aware of each other’s abilities and accomplishments in a way not obvious to those on the outside. Only those on the inside would have even known that was a story.

Symbolically, the ethnic media awards party was a public clarification of sorts. Setting the record straight that not all of journalism is in death throes, just the ones we used to think of first as “Media” with a capital “M.” Meanwhile, media that matters, whether that be ethnic journalism, hyper-local journalism, or community journalism, has assumed a new place in the information era. – Raj Jayadev