Over the past few months, New York City’s groundbreaking program to direct 50% of government advertising toward community news outlets has drawn fresh scrutiny. And in examining the policy’s strengths and weaknesses, two things are clear: First, the policy has succeeded as a lifeline to local news, directing more than $72 million to mostly small outlets that serve the city. Second, there are flaws that must be addressed.

A new independent report makes clear that since the policy went into effect, community and ethnic news outlets have benefited tremendously, in many cases improving coverage and staffing for the many communities that rely on non-English speaking outlets and hyperlocal community media for their news.

The report’s authors at the Center for Community Media at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York have tracked the impact of the policy with local publishers. Harlem World Magazine CEO Danny Tisdale said the advertising set-aside revenue allowed the newsroom to add a senior editor for the first time. Forum Daily editor Marina Baranchuk, who serves a Russian-speaking audience in New York City, said the increased revenue allowed her newsroom to better serve their community.

“The city’s advertising projects allowed us to expand our editorial team, increase the amount of daily publications and cover more topics. It also allowed us to bring in journalists who could report directly from the scenes of unfolding events,” Baranchuk said.

The Haitian Times saw its city advertising contracts grow from about $200 in 2019 to $73,000 in the first year of the set-aside policy. The increased advertising included public health and census ads. As a result, said publisher Garry Pierre-Pierre, “we were able to hire freelancers to beef up our coverage, to increase the hours of our social media director and to bring on a managing editor as well as a copy editor.”

The city’s own report in 2024 found the program had strengthened agencies’ ability to meet their marketing objectives, noting the policy had led to more refined and customized processes and data collection protocols and analysis of advertising spending and effectiveness. The policy also created opportunities for more advertising and marketing vendors to contract with the city — growing the pool of vendors from four to 19 — including more women-owned and minority-owned businesses.

Despite this demonstrated success in sustaining and growing local news coverage, critics of the program rightly point out the need for better and more accountable management of the policy. In late March, the city’s comptroller chided Mayor Eric Adams’ administration for slashing ad funding, accusing the Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media of delaying and mismanaging the 2024 required annual report detailing where the money is spent, and allegedly using the promise of city advertising to pressure news outlets to run press releases from the mayor’s office.

The report by the Center for Community Media at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York offers deep insights on the successes, shortcomings, and necessary revisions to the vital program in New York — and guidance from those looking to replicate the approach in Illinois, California, Vermont, Maryland, Minnesota, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

The report reveals what caused those problems: mislabeled and incomplete data reporting by the city that led to news outlets being omitted or inaccurately counted in the targeted spend, political conflicts of interest in the Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media’s connection to the administration that led news outlets to feel pressured to run the mayor’s press releases in order to compete for ad dollars, and failure of some city agencies to comply with the law by meeting the 50% set aside mandate. The decline in advertising is a function of tighter city ad budgets, the report finds, not mismanagement or abuse of power.

Still, the Center’s report acknowledges a key flaw in the policy implementation that must be addressed: Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media is the office that makes the final decisions about media outlet eligibility for ad placement while also promoting the mayor’s agenda, convening press conferences and distributing press releases — a conflict that puts news outlets in a difficult position, and risks placing political considerations above city marketing goals.

“This organizational structure can lead to an appearance of conflict of interest (in the best case scenario) or of pay-for-play practices (in the worst). Several publishers have warned about these risks under the administration of Mayor Eric Adams,” the report reads.

The CCM report also addresses the failure of some city agencies to meet the 50% set-aside for ethnic and community outlets in recent years. The report challenges the community media office’s past assertions that the percentage is a goal, not a mandate — emphasizing the text of the law: “‘Each mayoral agency shall seek to direct at least 50 percent of its total spending on advertising to ethnic and community media outlets, provided that a mayoral agency may apply to the executive director for an annual waiver of this goal.’ In most years, the city has met or exceeded this obligation—except in 2022 and 2023.”

For other large cities and states developing government advertising set-asides, transparency and reporting requirements, there is a lot to learn from New York City’s example. Here are some important takeaways:

Every government advertising set-aside policy should require independent oversight.

Serving as a watchdog to provide accountability and an independent assessment of the policy often fits well with the missions of higher education institutions and nonprofit groups. There are two main functions of a watchdog monitoring the policy from outside of either news outlets or government: to objectively determine which outlets qualify as local news organizations under a specific policy, and are therefore eligible to receive advertising, and to provide independent annual reporting of a city’s or state’s advertising spending.

The Advertising Boost Initiative at Center for Community Media has offered an independent oversight of the city’s advertising practices, maintaining its own directory of eligible ethnic and community news organizations. ABI also trains news outlets to update media kits and gather analytics data on audience reach and advertising performance. That data helps government agencies make informed marketing decisions, as well.

San Francisco State University is serving a similar role in that city; Montclair State University is leading a policy effort in New Jersey; and nonprofit Public Narrative created and maintains Chicago’s local news directory, among other services.

Accountability and transparency must be built into the structure of government advertising policies.

The Center for Community Media report — and the NYC comptroller’s findings, for that matter — were made possible by the transparency and accountability language built into the law itself. Accountability takes the form of strong requirements for annual reporting of:

• The overall advertising spend by each government agency or department;
• The names of each advertising vendor that received individual advertising contracts from a government agency or department, and the amount of the contract;
• The entity that received the advertising spending, including but not limited to search platforms, national news outlets, digital platforms, etc.
• The names of each qualifying local news outlet eligible under the advertising set aside — including but not limited to newspapers, websites, or local broadcast stations;
• The amount received by each local news organization that received the advertising spending, including which local news organization received which individual advertising buys, the agency and vendor responsible for that buy and the value of that advertising buy.

Breaking down the advertising spend in such detailed categories allows news outlets to better compete for ad dollars, and informs the public about where government money is being spent — from local news organizations to big tech platforms such as Google or Meta.

As some states have discovered, public records searches of advertising procurement contracts often do not include this level of detail. In addition to spending transparency, city and state governments should make public how advertising decisions are made, how spending reports are conducted, and how accountability and oversight is ensured.

Advertising decisions must be made by professional staff based on marketing goals and community needs, and firewalled from political considerations.

Advertising procurement processes should protect institutional independence, structurally eliminating potential conflicts of interest. Those decisions should also be careful and intentional, with professional scrutiny of the best outlets to achieve marketing goals. When the same advertising goals can be met by either local news outlets or nonlocal media, the tie should go to local news for its many additional benefits to communities. The smallest news organizations need all the help they can get to compete for advertising with larger media outlets that have more resources.

Government advertising set-aside and transparency bills have the advantage of requiring no additional budget appropriations, as many states struggle with budget deficits. The set-aside model is familiar to lawmakers and preserves the independence of local news organizations. Because it is not a subsidy, but requires local news outlets to compete for government ad dollars, it appeals to both liberal and conservative lawmakers. It is an all-American “buy local” policy applied to news media. And New York City pioneered the idea.

The city’s policy remains innovative and important, but must face the structural and practical flaws that have drawn criticism from oversight officials and local news outlets.