2005 Annual Report - Ethnic Media Newsroom Investment

The last 12 months have brought some interesting changes in ownership in the ethnic news media. As the growth of audiences continued through the last decade, a question emerged about what the ethnic press of the future might look like. Would the various ethnic communities across the country grow to the point where large, English-language companies would begin trying to buy into the audiences that they missed with their mainstream outlets? That happened relatively early on with Knight-Ridder's creation El Nuevo Herald to capture readers who might not read The Miami Herald. Or, as the ethnic populations grew, would competitors from outside the traditional big media companies emerge and develop their own foreign-language equivalents of the English-language chains? That has happened in television with Univision, which has evolved into the fifth-largest television network in America.

In the past year, Spanish-language papers in the three largest U.S. cities - New York, Los Angeles and Chicago - were joined under one company, ImpreMedia. La Opinion in Los Angeles, El Diario/La Prensa in New York and La Raza, a Chicago weekly, will now find out if a national corporate identity and presumably a more nationalized approach to some ad sales is a ticket to better times. Together La Opinion and El Diario/La Prensa have a daily circulation of more than 175,000,¹¹ and La Raza reports a weekly readership of nearly 170,000.¹² In theory the three could create a force in the Spanish-language print market in terms of ad sales and the ability to share bureau resources. But while the readers of all three papers speak Spanish, the similarities between their readerships end there. The papers serve very different populations - La Opinion largely a Mexican immigrant group, El Diario and La Raza a more diverse readership from a variety of Latin American countries. It seems thus far that there is no rush to create one national paper out of the three. In part that may be due to respect for each paper's individual identity, but it may also stem from the belief that a true merging of the papers into a national daily wouldn't work.

At the same time, Tribune Company, which once co-owned La Opinion, has pushed forward with a version of Hoy on newsstands in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. But Tribune has run into problems. After news of circulation skullduggery broke, the paper's re-audit showed that its supposed 92,000 daily circulation was overstated by some 46% and that the actual number was under 50,000.¹³ The bigger question for Tribune, however, is whether the company, which may want to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to all its Hoys, will understand the differences in the populations it is dealing with.

On a more local scale, Meximerica Media launched four daily newspapers in Texas in 2004. The papers, all called Rumbo (Spanish for "heading north") are based in Austin, Houston, San Antonio and an area comprising Starr, Cameron and Hidalgo counties. The four colorful, sharply designed tabloids are just the first step for Meximerica, which was funded by the Spanish company Recoletos Grupo de Comunicacion S.A. to the tune of $16.5 million in 2004. The company says it is considering "outside of Texas in 2005."¹⁴

Traditionally English-language companies continue to step into the foreign-language marketplace, though as a rule gingerly. In the Dallas-Fort Worth market, Knight-Ridder and Belo have Spanish-language papers competing with each other, La Estrella and Al Dia respectively. In Denver the Media News Group's Post and Scripps's Rocky Mountain News, which are run under a joint operating agreement, are working together on a Hispanic weekly that would take on the long-time weekly La Voz. In Detroit, another JOA city, the News (Gannett) and Free Press (Knight-Ridder) are reportedly looking into starting a weekly to compete with the local bilingual weekly El Central. Over all, mainstream news organizations own 46 (mostly weekly) Hispanic publications that have a combined circulation of 2.9 million, according to the Latino Print Network.¹⁵

And it is not just Hispanic publications. In San Jose, Knight-Ridder's Mercury News has been running the weekly Viet Mercury, a newspaper aimed at the area's large Vietnamese population, since 1999. San Jose is a special situation, with 110,000 Vietnamese Americans living in a relatively small area that is easy to target. The population has its own shops and businesses, and the Viet Mercury allows the Mercury News to tap into it. Interestingly, the Viet Mercury looks like a local Vietnamese-American newspaper rather than a copy of the San Jose Mercury in Vietnamese.¹⁶

In radio, Clear Channel, the medium's giant, announced in September 2004 that it was launching a bigger push into the Spanish-language market. The company had only 18 Spanish-language stations when it announced the move. It says it plans to convert 25 more stations to the format in 2005 and early 2006. The step suggests that Clear Channel, which controls more than 1,200 stations, has decided it needs a larger share of the growing Spanish-language market. But even adding those 25 stations would mean less than 4% of the company's total would be broadcasting in Spanish.¹⁷

In television, where there are fewer outlets, there is a more clear-cut winner so far in the competition between the two ownership approaches: Hispanic-run Univision is ahead of NBC-run Telemundo. How successful has Univision been? It doesn't just run the most popular Spanish-language network in the U.S., it also runs the second most popular, Telefutura, aimed at a younger audience.

The question for NBC is relatively straightforward: Are Telemundo's struggles a function of bad management or poor programming or could it be that the network simply hasn't put the resources into Telemundo that it needs to compete? NBC and Telemundo haven't sat completely still. Like Univision, Telemundo has added a second network, Mun2, or Mundos, aimed at younger viewers, aged 18 to 34. But over all, Telemundo is something of a side-project for NBC, one of many networks the broadcast giant is using to reassemble the mass audience it had when it was one of only three options available to viewers. It is competing with a company, Univision, for which Spanish-language broadcasting isn't one of many missions, but the only mission. So far, the competitor with the singular focus is riding high.