¿Que están haciendo para la gente en su comunidad que hablan y leen en Español? (Translation to come.)
If you understood that, your news organization might just be a step ahead of many in the industry. Perhaps you realize that the fastest growing segment of your market may very well be non-English speaking. Most probably, Spanish-speaking. More importantly, Spanish-reading.
You need only glance at your own news pages to realize this. You know, all those stories about how your schools and communities are changing, and that the folks changing them are new, predominately from Latin America, mostly Mexico.
The March issue of Poder magazine tells the story.
The Tribune Company, inheriting a marriage of convenience from the Los Angeles Times with the hometown La Opinión, is launching what is billed to be part of a national Spanish-language newspaper, Hoy. This comes after the Lozano family, which owns La Opinión, bought out Tribune’s 50 percent share in their previous partnership.
This turn of events speaks volumes.
The article talks of an impending newspaper war. It’s not about whether Newsday is making inroads on The New York Times. It’s not a rehash of the legal maneuvering, intrigue, and struggle for primacy occurring in Denver, Seattle, or any other community where newspapers are vying for declining, flat, or fickle numbers of English readers.
Los Angeles is shaping up to be the next big newspaper battleground. And the fight will be waged in Spanish. It will have nothing to do with Southern California’s own legions of fickle suburban readers, not the English-speakers anyway. But it will have everything to do with the common-sense strategy that growing your numbers is best accomplished if the numbers you are targeting are, in fact, growing. And this is a pretty good description of the Spanish-language market.
This particular war represents a turning point and an opportunity for the industry.
Tribune Company, with the third largest combined circulation in the country, is gambling that a sophisticated newspaper that provides international, national, and local news in Spanish can make gains in cities with large Spanish-speaking populations. It has launched Spanish-language newspapers in the last few years in Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago (with a publication formerly named Exito), and now Los Angeles.
La Opinión is betting that it can hold on to its niche and partner with others to do in other communities much what Tribune is attempting in Los Angeles. Again, read the Poder article. If you are working at a newspaper and this article doesn’t make you wonder about your own communities, you’re in the wrong business. This battleground might just be coming your way if you have any significant Spanish-speaking population. Do you want to be in the fight or just hold someone’s coat, content with continuing to chase your readers to the outer reaches of your suburban sprawls?
The national scope makes the upcoming Tribune–La Opinión battle significant. But it’s been a battle played out on smaller stages for a while now. Dallas, Fort Worth, and environs are now in the throes of war for Spanish readers, a battle waged between the Dallas Morning News‘ new Al DÃa and Knight-Ridder’s La Estrella, which has gone from weekly to daily in Fort Worth to compete.
The Press-Enterprise‘s La Prensa in Riverside, California has been camped in La Opinión‘s backyard for a couple of years now, attempting to siphon readers, or keep competitors out.
Yes, I know this column space is usually reserved for commentary on journalism that can make a difference. So I’m supposed to give you useful hints on how to do journalism better.
So, here’s a key one. Get off your butts and start serving your Spanish readers or someone else will.
There are couple ways to do this. Dallas is an example of a major daily starting its own Spanish-language newspaper. Phoenix, and my own Arizona Republic, is an example of the major daily buying a Spanish-language weekly, a partnership about a year old now and still feeling its way around.
If newspapers aren’t comfortable in Spanish, they might seek partnerships with Spanish-language television and radio to get their news to that population, at the same time creating a brand identity that will serve it well in the future.
And that’s really what we’re talking about here: the future. I can attest to the fact that if you get Spanish-speaking parents into the news, or the newspaper habit, the kids are likely to inherit it. It’s why I’m a news junkie.
It’s easy to see why Tribune is making this national gamble. The single largest bloc of the national Latino population is foreign-born, and presumably predominantly Spanish-speaking. This bloc is now about 45 percent of the Latino population.
By 2020, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, this will shrink to 25 percent of the population. Remember, however, that the entire Latino population will have grown significantly since then, judging from Census projections through 2050. By then, the entire Latino population will have grown 188 percent to 102.6 million. So Spanish-language media will be in no danger of lacking readers or viewers in the United States for the foreseeable future.
Still, by 2020, the single largest bloc, at 47 percent, will be the second generation — the children of immigrants. In other words, people like me who read and speak English far better than we read and speak Spanish.
If you don’t reach out to the first generation, what chance is there that the second generation will adopt the news-reading habit in either language?
So, back to that initial question posed in Spanish. What are you doing for the Spanish speakers and readers in your community?
Your job might depend on the answer.
