American Community Media, the first and largest association of ethnic news outlets nationwide, announces the appointment of Jaya Padmanabhan as its new Executive Director, effective Feb. 1. She will succeed ACoM founder Sandy Close, who is stepping back after three decades to assume the role of Director Emeritus.
“Jaya represents a new generation of leaders at ACoM who bring energy, ideas, tech smarts and business savvy to the sector at a time when AI is transforming not only how we gather and distribute news, but the very idea of what news is,” Close says.
Padmanabhan — who left a successful role as a software engineer in Silicon Valley to pursue her passion of journalism — brings over a decade of dedicated experience in the ethnic media sector.
She served as Executive Editor of India Currents, the oldest and largest Indian-American magazine on the West Coast; then as a biweekly columnist for the San Francisco Examiner; and most recently as project manager of the University of Southern California Center for Health Care Journalism’s Ethnic Media Collaborative project, where she provided mentorship, management and editorial support for ethnic media fellows across multiple multilingual newsrooms statewide.
“Ethnic media teaches me a different way of understanding news, documenting the intimate life of communities and amplifying voices largely unheard and unseen in the public space. I learned the enduring power of news outlets that provide a collective voice for their communities — the ‘we’ rather than the ‘I’ of journalism.”
A Moment of Reckoning for the Sector
“Despite a glut in information technology, people crave authentic voices and real, in-person connections,” Close says. “The hunger for trusted messengers who help people navigate the changes going on around them has never been greater even as revenue to support local news platforms has never been more scarce. We are at a moment of reckoning for our sector that will require integrating high-tech skills with high-touch engagement and collaboration. Jaya is poised to seize the moment.”
ACoM Co-director Julian Do, who joined American Community Media in its formative years and rejoined it in 2019, sees this as an exciting opportunity for ethnic media to make their mark. “Jaya will add a powerful advocacy voice for our sector as we implement new strategies to expand its social marketing role and audience reach.”
For more information about ACoM’s 25-year history and what we do, please visit our About Us section or contact our Communications Director Jessica Martin.
About American Community Media
American Community Media is a national nonprofit news and communications agency operating under the fiscal sponsorship of San Francisco Study Center and working to enhance the capacity of ethnic news outlets to inform and engage ethnic communities traditionally underserved by general-market media. ACoM’s mission is to build a more inclusive communications infrastructure that serves the public interest and promotes a participatory democracy. Its hybrid model — building a multilingual, pan-ethnic collaborative news exchange with weekly online news briefings and developing a pan-ethnic digital ad network — has steered over $20 million to ethnic media over the last five years in its home base of California alone.
