The fourth Meeting of Media Directors from the Azores and North America, held at California State University, Fresno, brought together newspapers, radio and television from both sides of the Atlantic and marked the definitive formalization of the Azores Diaspora Media Alliance. Coordinated by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute, ADMA seeks something increasingly urgent: ensuring that the Azores understand their diaspora—and that new generations of the diaspora continue to understand the Azores.
An ocean separates the Azores from California, but distance has never been measured exclusively in miles. It can also be measured in disappearing language, in stories that no longer cross generations, in newspapers that struggle to survive, in radio voices heard by an aging audience, or in young Azorean descendants who know the islands principally through the memories of grandparents. Journalism has always helped shorten that distance. On Friday, at California State University, Fresno, media professionals from the Azores and California gathered around the conviction that this bridge must not only be preserved but redesigned for another generation.
The occasion was the fourth Meeting of Media Directors from the Azores and North America, promoted by the Regional Secretariat for Parliamentary Affairs and Communities through the Regional Directorate for the Communities and organized jointly with the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI). The gathering culminated in the formalization of the Azores Diaspora Media Alliance (ADMA), coordinated by PBBI. The alliance itself has roots in the earlier meetings in Ponta Delgada and Angra do Heroísmo in May 2022 and Fall River and New Bedford later that year, followed by a third gathering in Toronto and Montreal in June 2025. A memorandum establishing ADMA had already been signed in Massachusetts in October 2022; its stated mission has been to create cooperation, exchange ideas and content, develop professional networks and deepen mutual knowledge between the islands and their communities abroad. Azores Government Portal
In Fresno, that ambition became tangible through three conversations corresponding to the traditional pillars of journalism. The press panel brought together Miguel Ávila of Tribuna Portuguesa, Paulo Viveiros of Diário dos Açores, José Lourenço of Diário Insular and Susana Garcia of Tribuna das Ilhas. Radio was represented by Regina Silveira of KLBS and KSQQ, João Manuel Dias of Rádio Portugal USA, Paulo Correia of RTP/Antena 1 Açores, Miguel Azevedo of Rádio Clube de Angra and Carlos Pires Antunes of Rádio Atlântida. The television discussion included João Manuel Dias of Televisão Portuguesa da Califórnia, Paulo Correia of RTP Açores and Paulo Feliciano of VITEC Azores TV. Different media, different audiences and different economic realities were represented, but they share an increasingly consequential question: how does Azorean journalism continue crossing the Atlantic when the people on the receiving shore no longer necessarily consume news in the same language, on the same platforms or in the same ways as their parents?
That question is already embedded in ADMA’s mission. The alliance describes itself as an open forum intended to encourage networking, reciprocal cooperation and wider coverage of the diaspora, while providing journalists with contacts and sources on both sides of the Atlantic. Its objectives also include encouraging young people to pursue journalism, developing possibilities for internships between the Azores and North America, strengthening relationships between academia and the media, and creating content specifically for Azorean descendants who do not communicate in Portuguese. Azores Diaspora Media This last objective may ultimately prove among the most important. Preserving Portuguese remains essential, but insisting that every relationship with the Azores must occur exclusively through Portuguese risks leaving outside the conversation precisely the second, third and later generations whom diaspora institutions most need to reach.
The symbolism of formalizing the alliance in California is therefore difficult to miss. The state is home to one of the largest concentrations of Azorean descendants in the world, and its communities carry more than a century of island migration into the American West. Yet the challenge today is no longer simply preserving the world created by the immigrant generation. It is creating a media ecosystem capable of reporting the contemporary diaspora in all its complexity—its achievements, difficulties, changing identities, declining and emerging institutions, cultural creation, political and civic participation, economic life and generational transformations—while simultaneously presenting the Azores not as the islands remembered by grandparents, but as the living society they are today.
The formalization ceremony was coordinated by Diniz Borges, director of PBBI at Fresno State and coordinator of ADMA, with Regional Director for the Communities José Andrade representing Regional Secretary for Parliamentary Affairs and Communities Paulo Estêvão. The Regional Government itself identifies ADMA among the networks through which it intends to develop relations with Azorean communities abroad, while the alliance operates under the aegis of PBBI. Orçamento Participativo Açores That university connection gives the project another possible dimension: journalism can become a bridge not only between media organizations but between reporters, students, researchers and younger generations who may eventually create entirely new ways of telling Azorean stories.
ADMA will ultimately be measured not by its name, ceremonies or institutional architecture, but by what begins to travel across the Atlantic because it exists. A story produced on Terceira that reaches a young reader in California. A report from the San Joaquin Valley that helps an audience in São Miguel understand what contemporary Azorean-American life actually looks like. A journalist in Horta who finds a source in Toronto. A Fresno student who interns with an Azorean newsroom. A diaspora newspaper that discovers a new English-speaking audience without abandoning Portuguese. A radio station on an island that begins hearing California not simply as the place where emigrants once went, but as another contemporary expression of Azorean life.
The first generations of Azorean emigrants crossed the Atlantic carrying letters. Later came newspapers, shortwave radio, cassette tapes, telephone calls, television and the internet. Every generation invented another way of defeating distance.
ADMA now inherits that unfinished work.
Because the future of the relationship between the Azores and their diaspora may depend not only upon continuing to tell stories across the ocean, but upon making certain that, on both shores, someone is still listening.
Based on a Press Release. Photo from Tribuna Portuguesa.