A newsletter by and for New Jersey South Asians serves the state’s sprawling Desi communities

In a suburb an hour drive away from both New York City and Philadelphia, I caught the journalism bug at my high school radio station in Central New Jersey. Several times a week, I scanned local mainstream media to write daily news broadcasts.

In high school, most of my friends were also South Asian or other kids of color. I never had to explain my religious holidays or cultural foods to anyone. We watched newly released Bollywood movies in theaters that served samosas and chai. The county park had two cricket pitches that were always full of players on the weekends. In a school district with a 51% Asian population, many of us at the radio station were of South Asian descent. But I rarely saw stories about our communities in the news.

Years later, Pakistani American journalist Ambreen Ali had a similar experience when she moved to Central Jersey in 2017. She was living in a lively Desi — a catch-all term for people of South Asian heritage — community that wasn’t reflected in local media. She had previously covered politics for CQ Roll Call and written about business and tech, but as a freelancer she was drawn to telling stories about immigrant communities in New Jersey. At that time, there were more than two million foreign-born residents in New Jersey, making up more than one-fifth of the state’s population. New Jersey has the highest concentration of South Asians of any state in the country.

“I was reading the Star-Ledger or New Jersey Monthly, and was really surprised at the absence of nonwhite voices and thought, surely this is just a mistake,” Ali said. “I pitched a story, and [the editor] wrote me back, and it rubbed me the wrong way. He was like, ‘we’ve already written about a story like this,’ which they really hadn’t, but it was more like, ‘oh, we’ve already written about these people.’”

That rejection ultimately motivated the 2022 launch of Central Desi — a free email newsletter about the South Asian American experience in New Jersey. It offers a mix of news, politics, and culture reporting for South Asians in the state as well as insider looks at trends and subcultures in New Jersey’s South Asian communities.

Some recent stories include: Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill targeting Desi voters in a tight race against Republican Jack Ciattarelli, Ciattarelli distancing himself from Trump policies (like H1-B visa fees) to appeal to Desi voters, the rise of Desi EDM in local nightclubs, how public libraries help new immigrants settle down in New Jersey, and more.

“The fact that we are local news makes us meaty,” Ali said. “We have substance because we’re not just [focused on] the culture, which is really all you can do when you’re writing at a level of trying to represent all of South Asian America.”

Ali first developed Central Desi through the Newmark J-School’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program in 2022. Today, Ali runs Central Desi along with four other part-time staffers. (Ali works full-time in communications at Princeton University.) Its fiscal sponsor is the Asian American Journalists Association and is primarily funded through grants (85%), and some advertising revenue (5%), Ali confirmed. In 2023, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium granted Central Desi $81,000 to launch a fellowship program for young journalists interested in writing about South Asian New Jersey. The grant was renewed for $100,000 in 2024.

While the stories are free to read, Central Desi offers a premium membership program priced at $150 per year that grants members access to members-only events and other perks. Ali declined to share how many paid members Central Desi has, but said membership accounts for 10% of total revenue. The newsletter, published weekly, has about 1,000 subscribers and a 60% open rate.

Ali thinks of Central Desi as the next generation of community media. There are at least 17 publications that cater to South Asian diaspora communities in New Jersey, according to the Asian Media Initiative at CUNY’s Center for Community Media. Many of them — newspapers, radio stations, and TV channels — serve South Asian immigrants with news from their countries, and some stories about South Asians in the United States. They publish in English and Urdu, Hindi, Bangla, Nepali, and more. But those stories don’t reflect the first-generation Desi American experience.

“The first generation of media publications served our parents’ generation,” Ali said. “It’s not that there was nothing, but there wasn’t something that tapped into that next generation where we identify with our culture, but we’re American. Nobody was doing that at the local level in New Jersey.”

People are taking notice offline, too. Once, Ali recalled, another mom came up to her in the preschool pickup line and said she recognized Ali from the newsletter. (“That was the happiest moment of my life,” Ali said. “I never thought this would happen.”) When she hosts Central Desi events at the Princeton Public Library, people often tell her about the South Asian information gap at the state and local levels.

“They feel like they don’t really know what’s going on in the Desi community in New Jersey,” Ali said. “They don’t know how to tap into it, but they’re looking for ways to find out.”

The Central Desi story that first caught my attention was published this past January. In it, Central Desi fellow Zoya Wazir details how Desi American singers in New York and New Jersey honor qawwali — a type of Islamic devotional music born in South Asia — by performing classic songs, hosting concerts, and offering events that teach young Desis and musicians about the genre’s craft, history, and culture. The story has stuck with me because I, too, grew up listening to qawwali music with my family and attending concerts. It’s a genre that’s wildly popular among South Asians, regardless of age, nationality, and religious affiliations.

“Part of what Central Desi tries to do is remind people that we have a lot in common and that actually we have a shared culture,” Ali said. “It’s not easy to penetrate this community, but I think what helps is having writers that belong to different parts of it because then they can tap their resources to tell interesting stories.”

Ali said that part of what makes Central Desi special is that, despite its local focus, its stories resonate with South Asians outside of New Jersey. After spending time in Houston last summer — another metro area with a massive South Asian population — Ali has been thinking about how Central Desi could expand to more U.S. Desi hubs.

“I often hear from people who say, why is this only for New Jersey? Why don’t you have this for everybody?” Ali said. “They like seeing the South Asian stories that we surface. There’s some serious thought going into whether this is the year that we try a second city. We don’t want to stretch ourselves too thin. We want to do New Jersey right, and there’s lots of ways we can do more here.”