Latinos want their own media, not gringo media

Published on Tuesday, 28 October 2008 13:29

BURLINGTON, N.C. — For area Latinos, la voz – literally, “the voice” – has been silenced indefinitely.

The Burlington Times-News, the city’s local daily newspaper, ceased publication of La Voz, its Spanish-language insert, at the end of the 2007 calendar year. Publisher Steve Buckley chalked up the section’s discontinuation to “lagging ad revenues.”

The fate of La Voz isn’t uncommon. While mainstream English-language papers across the country have implemented Spanish-language sections in order to capture the Hispanic demographic’s growing market share, some have failed to get off the ground.

Like scores of cities throughout the state, Burlington, population 50,000, finds itself at the crossroads between a sleepy, historic town and a bustling business hub. The Hispanic demographic is exploding, too, and it wants media that cater to its interests.

“When I moved out of Alamance County in 1992, there were about 700 (Hispanics),” said Madison Taylor, Times-News editor. “When I moved back, it was 14,000. And those are all legal immigrants who are accounted for.”

But with La Voz, the formula just wasn’t right, said former Times-News editor Lee Barnes, Taylor’s predecessor.

“The fact that we couldn’t staff it is what ultimately killed it,” said Barnes, now features editor at the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch. “You have to have a good Latino reporter and a good Latino ad salesperson.

“When we had that, we were cookin’.”

In Raleigh, a different business model has yielded different results. La Conexión, a Spanish-language weekly paper with a circulation hovering around 20,000, is by Hispanics, for Hispanics. Publisher Mike Leary, who founded the paper with eventual wife Lupita and Angel Robles in 1995, says he’s “the only white guy in the office.”

“Identity is a big thing,” he said. “Our readers identify real strongly with the newspaper.”

Newsroom woes

Barnes admits that La Voz lived and died by its staff, particularly its advertising sales executive.

“Selling ads was crucial,” he said. “The paper was making money. If they could have kept it staffed, the paper would still be going strong.”

When Barnes lost his Hispanic advertising personnel, however, the money dried up. Leary said he isn’t surprised; he cites a need to understand how the advertising process differs from the way mainstream media ad departments historically have done business.
 
“It’s a different style of advertising (with Hispanic papers),” he said. “Latinos are about relationships, not business models. You can’t just give a business owner a rate sheet. He wants to be your friend first.
 
“If you write something that an advertiser doesn’t like, (that person) won’t hesitate to pull their ads.”

Management at the Freedom Communications-owned Times-News wanted to continue publishing La Voz – according to the parent paper, the section maintained “a strong core readership” for six years – but they simply couldn’t find anyone to fill the personnel gaps.

“With five Freedom newspapers in North Carolina, I had the only Latino reporter on my staff,” Barnes said. “Latino reporters are scarce but in demand.”

Newspapers serving communities with a long-standing Hispanic demographic have such a luxury. “If you go to Texas, Latino journalists are everywhere – they’re common,” Barnes said. “It would be very simple in terms of staffing to put out a Spanish-language paper.”

By contrast, La Conexión enjoys a robust team of more than 20 Hispanic journalists and staffers.

The problems associated with allocating media attention to North Carolina’s Hispanic community are magnified by accelerated growth in the number of Hispanics in the state.

A 2005 Pew Hispanic Center report found that North Carolina received the largest Hispanic boom, at 394 percent growth, among U.S. states during the 1990s. And the state saw an increase of 42.8 percent in immigrant population growth between 2000 and 2006, according to U.S. Census Bureau data; only seven states outpaced the Old North State during the same time period.

That gives a little causality to the influx of N.C. Spanish-language medial outlets. Viva Greenville began serving Pitt County in late 2006, and Charlotte’s Qué Pasa has extended its reach since 2004. (Qué Pasa, the Queen City’s second Hispanic-produced paper alongside La Noticia, also runs a radio station.) Even The Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina’s student newspaper, has published Spanish-language section La Colina since 2006.

Taylor called Qué Pasa a frontrunner for North Carolina’s Spanish-language market. “I think it is going to become the Hispanic paper of record in the state,” he said.

Still, Barnes remains skeptical about the prospects of Hispanic media startups in the state.

“I don’t see it ballooning in (North Carolina),” he said. “If English newspapers are losing circulation, why should Spanish papers go the other direction? We’re already competing against Craigslist, the Internet and Hispanic TV channels.

“Regardless of language, journalism is struggling.”

Speaking the readers’ language

There’s another source of instability for Spanish-language papers: unlike Texas, the Hispanic population in North Carolina is, for the most part, much more transient in nature. For some readers, it’s here one day, gone the next.

Leary says he hasn’t had many problems with keeping long-term readers.

“We might have Hispanics in the community who go to work in Raleigh for six months, and then go to Greensboro for nine months,” he said. “But it’s not a problem retaining those readers.”
 
The Times-News staff found it hard to get an idea of what readers wanted, Barnes said.

“We got very little feedback,” he said. “We did some focus groups. A lot of what we found was contrary to what we thought the readers wanted.

“For example, we thought they would like a tabloid, but the response we got was that tabs are cheap – they wanted their paper in broadsheet format. So we did broadsheet the whole time La Voz ran.”

Taylor said the Times-News has seen a similar muted response from Burlington’s Hispanic community since he joined the paper last year.

According to research, some probably wouldn’t open a copy of La Voz at all. For immigrants, the amount of time spent locally is a determining factor in the decision to read mainstream or ethnic outlets, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s “The State of the News Media 2008” report.

The report found that recent immigrants tended to side with Hispanic-produced media; on the other side of the coin, established “locals” often favor mainstream publications and even English-language media. The trends correlate with English-language adoption rates, the report notes.

Whatever the source, the Times-News focus groups did find that Hispanic readers wanted the same news that the rest of Burlington’s residents got to enjoy.

“What they wanted was consistent with what you would want in an English newspaper,” Barnes said. “They were very big on reading Spanish translations of regular stories.”

The Times-News has had trouble providing those. “We had problems bringing in translators,” Barnes said. “I had two people that really stuck out because they had been raised in homes where one parent was Latino and one American. But they were bad spellers – no matter the language, a bad speller is a bad speller.”

Ultimately, the former editor admits that Hispanic residents of Burlington probably didn’t anticipate award-winning pieces each week.

“I don’t think their expectations were particularly high,” Barnes said. “I don’t know that it was particularly well-read.”
       
Primary Source

It’s a stark difference compared to La Conexión, where Leary estimates that up to two-thirds of readers consider the newspaper to be their primary news source.

While the paper enjoys a community-sized circulation of 20,000, it boasts a readership four times as high. “A lot of the copies get read a number of times,” Leary said, noting that during the summer months, people have been known to cart hundreds of copies to migrant work sites.

In fact, he’s not even sure how to pinpoint some of the readership.

“Something like 25 percent of our online readership is from Mexico,” Leary said. “We’re still looking into how that is happening.

“Maybe it’s families checking up on relatives. Maybe some people will move back to Mexico but still want to check up on what’s going on in Raleigh.”

Regardless, the publisher attributes La Conexión’s success with readers to recognition of diversity. “The problem with a lot of these Spanish-language (mainstream) papers is in the way they treat their readers as if they are all the same,” Leary said. “Not every Hispanic is going to be the same.”

Minority report

What irks Leary the most – and probably what serves as a catalyst for most by-Hispanic, for-Hispanic startups – is the lack of coverage among mainstream outlets devoted to issues within the community.

La Conexión’s publisher is particularly incensed at the lack of state media coverage of the Real ID Act; the federal government has requested that North Carolina comply with the provision, which seeks to verify the identities of driver’s license holders.

For a community that hosts scores of illegal immigrants who carry licenses, the ramifications are immense, Leary said.

“I didn’t see that story anywhere,” he said. “No one covered it. But it’s a huge story in our community.

“People don’t always realize the impact that this community has,” Leary continued. “There is a pent-up economic demand in the community. José, who gets a license and a job based on his license – say, driving a crew around – you’re an idiot to think he’ll stop driving.”

But that impact, particularly the economic reverberations, might reach beyond the Hispanic community, as well. Leary said he has spoken with Raleigh car salesmen who worry about the chilling effect that implementation of the Real ID Act would have on business.

“There are car dealers who used to sell 30 to 40 cars to Hispanics a month around here,” he said. “They can’t sell those cars anymore.”

Tomorrow’s edition

Despite ceasing publication of La Voz, the Times-News still strives makes reporting on the Hispanic community a priority, Taylor said.

“We get photos of Little League sports in today, and all the names in the captions read ‘Gutierrez’ or ‘Ramirez,’” he said. “We do understand that is part of our market.”

The paper’s editorial staff has had discussions about how to address the scope of that market.

“(Proper coverage) is a slippery thing,” Taylor said. “Once a group like the Hispanic community assimilates into the main community, they’re essentially becoming the community.”

But Leary is confident that the community newspaper trend is irreversibly headed toward specialization of coverage.

“The successful papers are becoming niche-oriented,” he said. “If you’re a gun nut, you can find what you want to read on the Internet. If you’re an environmentalist, you can read news catered to you.

“To a gun nut today, if you’re not a gun nut, you’re not mainstream.”

The success of both the Hispanic-produced outlets and mainstream publications will depend on how closely they follow a changing Hispanic community and the issues surrounding it.

“The generation of immigrants coming into the country today is much different,” Leary said. “This generation can buy products straight from Mexico here – it’s much easier now. The language and the culture (are) getting renewed constantly.”

In Burlington, the politics behind immigration continue to grow more heated, Taylor said, noting that some county commissioner candidates are running primarily on their immigration stances.

“Almost any time we run an immigration story, we get the anti-immigration (feedback),” he said. “If you look at the online comments for those stories, they’re usually the most vocal, and sometimes really nasty.”

Taylor also singled out the Alamance County Jail 287(g) immigrant processing program as a major issue. The program, started in March 2007, serves as an expedited process for deportation and has drawn the ire of immigration activists.

“They have a separate section of the jail just for immigrants who have been processed through 287(g),” he said. “That’s a big story.”

And though La Voz might have ceased, the story – as with plenty of others in Burlington and beyond – isn’t going away.

Jake Potter graduated from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication in May 2008. He interned at the Motley Fool in the summer of 2007.

www.thetimesnews.com

www.laconexionusa.com

www.quepasamedia.com/web

Project for Excellence in Journalism

Pew Hispanic Center

Real ID Act