Spanish-Language Sites Provide Lessons in Expanding Markets
By Alison Shackelford
Diario La Estrella |
English-language news sites are taking a crash course on Latino culture in an effort to attract new readers from among
the burgeoning U.S. Latino market, one of the fastest-growing groups of new Internet users.
Mary Zerafa, director of La Opinión Digital (http://www.laopinion.com), the nation’s leading Latino news site,
said the success of her site is a result of being sensitive to the interests and traditions of its users.
“We have a business section, but it doesn’t look like anyone else’s business section,” Zerafa told
a gathering of journalists attending a Western Knight Center seminar on the business of online journalism. Business stories at
La Opinión , she said, will typically pay close attention to things like family roots and the problems and issues facing
small businesses.
Zerafa said that Latinos make up 14 percent of the U.S. population, and that number will grow to 25 percent by 2020. Nearly
half of the Latino population is Net-savvy, she said, adding that entertainment—rather than news—is the main reason
Latino users go online.
English-language newspaper sites looking to draw Latino users would be better served offering music and sports popular in Latino
communities rather than Spanish-language translations of regular stories, Zerafa said.
Bruno Lopez, vice president and general manager of Univision Online, told conference participants that it can be a struggle
to get Latino viewers to look at news. “I have to trick my readers,” he said. But the process has taught his staff
to be innovative in coming up with thoughtful and interesting projects to sell their news section.
For instance, Lopez said, his site recently posted a health article and promoted it with an entertainment tie-in: It explained
the baffling illness afflicting a popular telenovella character. (A telenovella is a Spanish soap opera.)
Lopez said Univision Online (http://www.univision.com/) has developed three
main focuses: news, entertainment and “how-to’s.” The
site’s editorial staff, he said, produces most of its content, partly because Spanish-language wire services tend to cover
Spanish-speaking countries, not the United States. Innovative how-to’s offer such things as Spanish-language mortgage sites
and information about immigration and visas.
But for Univision Online, entertainment is still king, and making it interactive has helped Lopez convince the company’s
broadcast unit of the site’s viability. The site uses online polls, contests (a search for the “Most Useless Husband
in America” was a crowd pleaser), chat rooms for popular TV shows and lots of information about telenovellas. “Now
we help determine the ratings [of TV programs],” Lopez said.
Javier Adalpe, publisher of the Texas-based print and online Spanish-language Diario La Estrella, said traditional
interpretations of statistics about Spanish speakers no longer apply. Unlike previous waves of immigrants, Adalpe said, American-born
Latinos are encouraged to learn their parents’ language. “Spanish is considered a business asset,” Adalpe said.
And statistics can still show publishers where reader interest lies. For instance, in Los Angeles, the majority of immigrants
are from Mexico; in New York, they’re largely from Puerto Rico. Because Diario La Estrella (http://www.dfw.com/mld/laestrella)
is viewed by more Mexicans and Mexican descendants, it offers city and government guides to Mexican states, and it’s no
accident that the paper’s news racks resemble the Mexican flag.
Ismael Nafría, a columnist for Barcelona-based La Vanguardia.es (http://www.lavanguardia.es),
explained how newspapers sites in Spanish-speaking countries lure ex-patriots by adding content to take the place of daily TV
and radio news to which they no longer have access. From Spain to Chile, news sites have begun offering things like music downloads
and recipes to bring popular and traditional culture to their far-flung countrymen. “It’s all about finding different
ways to feel closer to home,” Nafría
said. |
