The result is that many of these publishers can still support their operations with revenue from print advertising. Castaño, for example, makes 90 percent of his money from print ads, with the majority coming from local businesses. “I’ve been profitable since the beginning,” he told me.

That’s also partly because the Queens Latino only has one full-time employee: Castaño. The rest of the work is done by freelancers, and Castaño’s wife does the layout and design.

At the Urdu Times, Rehman has outsourced most of his newspaper’s operations to a small production unit in Pakistan. “I have 18 people working for me in Lahore,” he explained. The copies are drafted there and then emailed to the basement in Queens for proofreading, as are all the page layouts. Rehman and his wife approve everything, and then forward it to the printers. His only full-time employee in New York is an advertising manager, who has his own desk at the back of the store above the basement.

Such low-cost production setups are why Ken Akulin, the general manager of Stellar Printing, one of New York’s biggest printers of ethnic newspapers, believes there hasn’t been an easier time to become a publisher. “They put it together on their Macintosh, add one or two or three ads, come to a printer like me to print it up and distribute it,” he explained.

The Long Island City press prints 11 dailies and more than a hundred weeklies and monthlies in over 20 languages every week. “It’s quite simple,” Akulin added. “It can be done almost as a cottage industry.”

But there are emerging challenges for the ethnic press. Seventeen years after starting his Romanian newspaper, New York Magazin, Grigore Culian is facing two of the biggest ones: A decline in advertising revenues and a shrinking readership.

The first is the result of the recession. New York’s immigrant community, which accounted for about 31 percent of the city’s gross city product in 2011, was particularly hit hard. From 2007 to 2009, immigrant wages dropped by 12 percent, according to a 2013 New York State Comptroller report, compared with nine percent for native-born New Yorkers.

Small-business owners, the lifeblood of the ethnic press, started cutting back on advertising, as did large telecom and insurance firms who often bought full-pages to reach non-English speaking communities.

Culian is also contending with a dwindling readership as new immigration from Romania has slowed down. His loyal readers are aging, and few American-born Romanians are subscribing to his twice-weekly newspaper. Circulation has halved from 4,000 copies five years ago to only about 2,000 now.

But the former rock musician is unfazed. He has a plan: The same plan that New York’s mainstream media has executed over the last decade. “I know the Internet is the future,” said Culian, “My newspaper will stay, but I need to build it online.”