A coalition of funders is trying to save journalism, and one of the first to receive their aid is a little-known website serving a small ethnic community in Sacramento. Press Forward announced its first cohort of grant recipients in October. Of 931 proposals nationwide, only 205 organizations received funds totaling $20 million. Eighteen grantees were based in California with only one in the Capital Region: Hmong Daily News.

“Wow! It was just beyond me,” says Macy Yang about when Press Forward awarded her $100,000 to expand operations. Yang runs a newsroom of “two and a half,” which includes herself, military journalist Marc Yablonka and a high school student. Together they cover the lives of the Hmong diaspora, who largely came to the U.S. as refugees from Southeast Asia about 50 years ago.

“We are serving a population that is not being served,” Yang says. “Our needs, as far as media and information, are not being met. And so we’re helping to close the gap for the Hmong community.”

To that end, Yang used the grant money to hire a social media marketer, who will also contribute articles. She is also looking to bring on reporters who can write in the Hmong language. Her goal is to increase the Hmong community’s visibility, platform their triumphs and make relevant information accessible to them.

An estimated 27,000 Hmong live in the Sacramento ​​metropolitan area as of 2019, according to the Pew Research Center. The last census put the region’s total population at about two and a half million, meaning there is one Hmong out of every hundred people living in and around the state’s capital. While this is a relatively large percentage for a single Indigenous group — in comparison, American Indian and Alaska Native residents of any nation make up 1.6 percent of Sacramento County’s population — a TV station or daily newspaper covering stories for a wide audience wouldn’t tailor their content for a group comprising a sliver of their target market. That’s where ethnic media outlets come in.

Yang on the website commemorates the everyday victories of her people. She writes up how-to-vote guides for the Hmong and covers their events. One of her proudest works was “Hmong Women in Leadership,” a series of profiles on Hmong women serving in government. “Those are not things that necessarily the Sacramento Bee may want to cover, but it is an important milestone for us, an achievement that we want to highlight.” There are a lot of positive stories in the Hmong Daily News, but Yang doesn’t shy away from crime coverage and murder trials.

During the pandemic, the newsroom dispelled myths spread specifically among the Hmong about COVID-19. “There’s just a lot of misinformation that big outlets were not going to address for one community versus another,” Yang says. So she stepped up to share accurate facts reported by Hmong, for Hmong. “Not only do we tell our story, but we are the platform to give information out accurately and to decipher what’s correct and what’s incorrect.”

Yang is passionate about telling the story of her people, who have a long history. The Hmong originated in China about 4,000 years ago but in the 18th century began migrating en masse to Southeast Asia, according to the Hmong American Center. The CIA recruited Hmong soldiers to fight communists in Laos and Vietnam in what became known as the Secret War. This led to the Hmong to become persecuted after the U.S. pulled out of the region in the 1970s. These refugees fled their homeland and resettled in the West, including Yang. She was 4 years old when her family immigrated from Laos to Wisconsin. They later joined an influx of Hmong moving to California to farm and escape the cold.

Yang works as a business consultant, but before moving back to California a few years ago from the Midwest, she freelanced for the Prescott, Wisconsin-based Hmong Times in her spare time. She wanted to continue her craft in Sacramento. There is the Hmong radio station KJAY, but no Hmong newspapers. So she started her own. The onset of a global pandemic isn’t an ideal time to launch a newspaper, but that’s the situation Yang found herself in. The Hmong Daily News launched in March 2020. Originally a twice-weekly print newspaper found at grocery stores and Hmong-owned businesses, the news outlet quickly shifted to be online only to cut costs and to publish news faster.

There have been moments over the past four years when Yang has struggled. Sometimes she wondered if Hmong Daily News mattered. “There were times when I just felt like nobody was reading my news,” Yang says. She always fought off that negativity, and networking with other journalists through Ethnic Media Services helped. The San Francisco-based organization provides resources to ethnic outlets, and it was through them Yang learned of the Press Forward grant.

Sandy Close serves as its executive director and said ethnic news outlets have endured despite the difficulty. “People talk about the death of community journalism, and you almost never see in those articles references to ethnic media, which has continued against the odds,” Close says. Often these newspapers and websites struggle with financial stability. It can be hard to garner advertisement dollars from businesses and government agencies because their communities are small and dispersed. “There was a collective shrug, if indeed ad agencies even knew they existed.”

Things have begun to change. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1511 into law, which aims to bolster ethnic media across California. State agencies and departments that spend money on ads moving forward will develop plans to increase money spent on outlets like Hmong Daily News. Close said the importance of ethnic media goes beyond just covering news. It serves as an advocating voice for their community. Yang wants broader Sacramento to learn about the Hmong through her reporting.

“Our stories are not unique,” Yang says, “Our experience is not so unique to the immigrant or the refugee story, but we want the greater community out there to understand who we are and where we came from, what our values are and what stories we want to be able to tell.”

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