Advertising Boost Initiative:

Five-Year Impact Report

(2020-2024)

MAY 2025

Executive Summary

Five years ago, a visionary action by the local government transformed the community media¹ sector in New York City. An executive order from former Mayor Bill de Blasio in May 2019 mandated that city agencies allocate at least 50 percent of their print and digital advertising budgets to news organizations that serve communities of color, immigrants and neighborhoods.

The executive order had an enormous and immediate impact. It redirected almost $10 million, which represented 84% of the city’s ad budget that year, to more than 200 community media outlets in 2020, shielding them from the financial devastation of the first year of the pandemic. In reaching communities across 39 languages throughout the city, this effort also represented a more effective use of ad dollars by a government mandated to keep New Yorkers informed about its actions and resources.

In June 2021, this executive order was codified in Local Law 83, which expanded the definition of eligible community media to include radio and television outlets, and led to the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media (MOECM). Local community news leaders, fearing that an executive order could be overturned or ignored by a new mayoral administration, advocated for and celebrated this passage as a triumph. Through the work of the Center for Community Media (CCM) at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, it also became a model of effective media policy for other cities and states around the country.

The impact of this policy cannot be overstated:

• In its first five years, it injected more than $72 million into the local community media sector. This helped critical information reach New Yorkers who rely on community media as their primary source of news, and added an important source of revenue for these outlets.

• Codification also brought a new level of accountability and transparency to the city’s distribution of ad dollars. Prior to Executive Order 47 and Local Law 83, New York City’s advertising procurement process operated essentially as a black box, with the city relying on two ad-placement agencies that channeled most city advertising dollars to a handful of mainstream media organizations. The new policy led to a diversification of advertising agencies by creating a more open and competitive bidding process for advertising agencies to become a city vendor.
• The city created a public directory of ad recipients in an effort “to guide agencies to place advertising campaigns consistent with the goals of Local Law 83.” It also instituted a more transparent process for inclusion by requiring publishers to submit standardized documentation—such as rate cards, audience data and distribution reports—that is publicly outlined on MOECM’s website.

But important challenges remain. The most critical are:

• Lack of political independence: MOECM, the office that makes the final decisions about media outlet eligibility for ad placement, is part of the executive office of the mayor—the same office that promotes the mayor’s agenda, invites journalists to the mayor’s press conferences and sends out the mayor’s press releases to community media journalists. 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 voices have warned about these risks under the administration of Mayor Eric Adams. 
• Irregular compliance with spend percentage mandate: Successive executive directors of MOECM have argued that the law sets a goal—not a mandate—for the city to allocate 50% of its annual advertising budget to community media. However, the text of the law is clear: “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.”² In most years, the city has met or exceeded this obligation—except in 2022 and 2023.

Another major challenge, in the view of several community media publishers interviewed for this report, is that the city’s advertising budget fluctuates from one fiscal year to the next, and has contracted significantly from pandemic-era levels. The legislation did not establish a consistent, dedicated budget for community media advertising, and the city’s ad budget depends on the city’s annual fiscal needs. Some publishers would like to see a set-aside budget for community media. CCM takes no position on this issue, but in order to navigate changing economic factors and preserve editorial independence, news organizations must not rely exclusively on government dollars. Instead, they should diversify their revenue sources.

This report also measures the impact of the Advertising Boost Initiative (ABI), established in 2020 by CCM in response to the 2019 executive order. ABI serves as an information bridge between city agencies, advertising agencies and community media organizations, assisting the latter to become more effective in accessing their share of city agencies’ advertising budgets. ABI also tracks compliance with Local Law 83, and publishes regular reports that are meant to provide more transparency and government accountability. 

This five-year impact report strongly recommends establishing an independent structure for MOECM, with clear firewalls between the mayor’s office and the city’s advertising allocation decisions. Achieving this would require new legislation. In the meantime, the report proposes a set of changes the city could adopt immediately to increase accountability, including publicly disclosing how advertisement placement decisions are made, and requiring MOECM to publish more detailed and better structured reports on ad placements. 

The findings in this report are based on five years of data on city government ad placement, ABI’s two initial reports on the impact of Executive Order 47 (they can be found here and here), and conversations with dozens of community media publishers and broadcasters, city officials and ad agency executives since 2020.

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¹ Community media includes news organizations serving the information needs of immigrants, communities of color, linguistic groups and hyperlocal areas. Many of these outlets are categorized as “ethnic media” by the city. CCM uses the term “community media” as a broader term.

² MOECM’s web page also states: “The MOECM, the first Mayoral Office of its kind in the United States, was established by Local Law 83 of 2021, which requires that each mayoral agency shall seek to direct at least fifty percent of its total spending on advertising to Ethnic and Community Media (ECM) outlets.”

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