2004 Annual Report - Spanish-Language Media

Ownership

In general, a big wave of consolidation has yet to really hit the print side of the Spanish-language media, but that is beginning to change. It is still largely rooted in community papers that sprang up as the immigrant populations arrived. The owners are local and the papers are unique to that community. Take for example El Mañana, an independent 20,000-circulation daily in Cicero, Illinois, or La Voz Hispana de Connecticut, a 15,000-circulation newspaper in New Haven owned by the local La Voz Hispana Newsprint that publishes twice a month.⁵

But as the Hispanic population has grown in size and buying power a trend seems to be developing wherein large non-Hispanic companies are looking to tap into the Spanish-speaking market. The Tribune Company is setting out to create a national chain of Spanish-language papers that can negotiate national advertising contracts. The company has announced an expanded Sunday version of Hoy in Chicago. And Tribune has sold off its share of the Los Angeles daily La Opinion to the paper's founders, the Lorenzo family, with whom Tribune co-owned La Opinion. Tribune is now expected to launch a Los Angeles version of Hoy to compete with La Opinion. The battle between these two papers, one a venerable Hispanic-owned outlet and the other a part of Tribune's growing Spanish-language presence, will be a critical one in the coming years. Meanwhile, the A.H. Belo Co., publisher of The Dallas Morning News, is launching a Spanish-language daily in Dallas. And Knight-Ridder looks ready to expand. Its El Nuevo Herald in Miami is one of the fastest-growing newspapers in the country and the paper's success has led the company to expand its Fort Worth Spanish-language daily, La Estrella.

In the beginning of 2004, a second trend emerged in Spanish-language newspaper ownership. The owners of La Opinion and New York's El Diario/La Prensa merged to create a new Hispanic-owned media company, Impremedia. The company was created to serve as a counterbalance to the buyouts and expansions by English-language companies in the Spanish-speaking newspaper market. Impremedia made clear from its inception that it plans to buy other Spanish-language newspapers and become a force that might be able to take on behemoths like Knight-Ridder and Tribune.

Economics

The last dozen years have seen ad revenues skyrocket at Spanish-language daily newspapers. Since 1990 the figures have grown more than sevenfold, from $111 million in 1990 to $786 million in 2002, according to figures from the Latino Print Network, an organization designed to help find advertisers for Spanish-language papers.⁶

Spanish-Language Newspaper Ad Revenues

Selected years, 1970 - 2002

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Kirk Whisler/WPR, Carlsabd, CA

* U.S.-based newspapers

Beyond the simple demographic changes and increase in the number of outlets, Spanish-language newspapers have had another benefit to aid their growth. Unlike other ethnic presses, the growth of the Spanish-language press and Hispanic readership has led to a kind of nationalization of advertising resources in the form of the Latino Print Network. The spread of the Hispanic population has helped make this market national. The Latino Print Network sells ads to newspapers that are part of the National Association of Hispanic Publishers group, consisting of papers in 27 states.

This wide reach is important. Even though the Spanish-language newspapers are more developed than some of their other ethnic-media counterparts, their numbers are still small compared to the circulation of the major English-language metro dailies. Even La Opinion, the Los Angeles daily with the largest paid circulation of any Spanish language paper in the country, has a circulation of only about 126,000.⁷ By creating a national Spanish-language market, the Latino Print Network has created an easy way for national advertisers to reach "over 200 publications and 10 million subscribers with one phone call," as the group says on its site. This one-stop shopping can only aid the growth of the Spanish language press particularly as the number of large chain stores grows.