Lessons from Spanish-Language Media

By Amy Eagleburger
July 14, 2008 01:23 PM

In the early 1990s, daily newspapers in cities with significant Latino populations rolled out bilingual sections and inserts to appeal to Spanish-speaking readers.  The publications floundered and most bilingual sections are now a thing of the past.

But in their wake, standalone publications like Hoy and Al Día, created by the Chicago Tribune and The Dallas Morning News respectively, have become the heartbeat of Latino communities. They also offer a wealth of information and tips for business journalists at mainstream newspapers.

“People should be monitoring Spanish-language media … it’s such a powerful force,” said Gilbert Bailón, editorial board editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and former editor of Al Día.

Bailón said even without a bilingual reporter on staff, reporters can keep tabs on Spanish-language media through Web sites that are often in English and Spanish.

Looking to this media can open up a whole range of possibilities in how mainstream newspapers cover stories affecting and/or involving minority communities.

“They’re covering the whole tomato scare from a different angle because some Mexican farms might be implicated,” Bailón said of the Spanish-language press.  “Mexicans, they feel that they’re always the fall guy.  I think that as a business writer I’d like to hear their side of the story.”

Spanish-language newspapers have also found ways to grow circulation numbers even while mainstream newspapers are scrambling to cuts costs.  While the total circulation of Spanish-language dailies doesn’t crack the top 25, the fastest-growing newspaper in 2008 was El Diario La Prensa, published in New York City.  The Spanish-language daily grew in circulation by 7.8 percent, more than twice the growth rate of the number two publication, The Times of Munster, Ind., an English-language publication which grew by 3 percent.

“We try to make it a lot more understandable and clear to them with what is going on with the financial crisis,” said Alejandro Escalona, editor of Hoy, of the paper’s mission to the Latino community.  “We publish a profile every Tuesday on Latino entrepreneurs that started a business with almost no money.”

Recent immigrants constitute some of the most prolific entrepreneurs.  In New York, 36 percent of immigrants ran their own business and in Los Angeles the number is 22 percent.

“A lot of immigrants come to the U.S. without much and then they start a business … it can be anything from selling spare parts for cars or clothes,” Escalona said.  “You’ll find a lot of that type of spirit in the Latino community.”

The trend was well covered in a Feb. 2007 story by the Tucson Citizen.  Even without hard and fast statistics, the anecdotal evidence from store fronts and a couple that owned a flower shop provided a picture of the minority business community, an image that appears irregularly in the mainstream press.

“Generally speaking, whole neighborhoods have been revitalized by minority-owned business,” Bailón said.  “That story is not told as well as it should be.”

Finding stories of entrepreneurial success can take a significant amount of groundwork on the part of reporters.  Al Día editor-in-chief Alfredo Carbajal said reporters must move beyond phone calls to the Hispanic chambers of commerce and forge links with individual business owners.

“One of the reasons you don’t see a lot of coverage of Hispanic-owned businesses is because there are not a lot of connections,” he said.  “Get deeper into the community.  Get better stories through better sourcing.”

A big part of that connectivity is the hiring of bilingual reporters.  The University of Texas at El Paso is one of several schools that now offer degree programs for Spanish-language journalism.

UTEP’s Rubin Salazar Spanish-language Media program requires students take courses in linguistics and media translation and partake in an internship with a Spanish-language publication, said Patricia D. Witherspoon, chairwoman of the school’s communications department.

“The impetus came because we’re here on the border,” she said.  “We have Spanish-language newspapers all around us.”

UTEP’s students have had internships from Spokane, Wash. to Philadelphia, showing that the demand for bilingual reporters is not just a regional phenomenon, Witherspoon added.

Florida International University and California State University Northridge have similar programs and the University of California, Los Angeles has started a certificate program in partnership with La Opinión and Univision 34.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism