By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

The story of the ethnic media heading into 2007 is one of a bright past and present, but perhaps a more complicated future.

On the surface of the numbers, there is a lot of good news to report. While many mainstream outlets are suffering declines in audience and revenue, the ethnic media seem to be riding above it all. For the most part, their audience and revenue numbers are still growing. Demographic figures show not only that the number of foreign-language speakers has grown, but also that the communities in which those people live have fanned out around the country, creating new markets for the ethnic print and broadcast outlets to serve. And more of the publications are having their circulations audited, a sign of growing maturation and interest in giving advertisers more solid measures of their readerships.

Still, there are signs of potential difficulty in changing demographics. The year 2006 was the first time that growth in the U.S. Latino population came more from births than immigration. And there is reason to believe that those second-generation citizens are more likely to turn to English-language outlets. In addition, experts in the industry say ethnic media are at least five years behind the mainstream media in moving to the Internet, with many smaller publications having done little or nothing in that area. And the sale of the Hispanic broadcast giant Univision in 2006, while it was a blockbuster deal, did not generate the interest from buyers that many had expected.

But this vibrant media sector is healthy, though going through some changes.

The Population Picture

More than in any other media type we study, the growth and health of the ethnic media are determined by a dynamic and constantly changing population. Understanding what is happening with the nation’s recent immigrants and native-language speakers is not easy. Trends that indicate one thing — say a growing number of Spanish-speakers — have sub-trends such as the language habits of those people’s children. Thus even when short-term trends appear clear, their longer-term impact can be more difficult to grasp.

So what are the population trends heading into 2007?

The biggest is that America’s new immigrant populations are spreading out. The phenomenon was noted, and widely publicized, in August 2006, with the release of the U.S. Census Community Survey. While the traditional immigrant states, California, New York, Texas and Florida, still have the largest immigrant populations by far, others are seeing big increases. New Hampshire, Colorado, Missouri, Delaware and South Dakota and Indiana, not normally considered immigrant havens, all have seen increases of more than 25% in their immigrant populations since 2000.¹

According to the survey, 34 out of 50 states, and the District of Columbia, had more than 8% of their population speaking languages other than English at home in 2005, up from 28 just three years earlier. ^{2 3}

Percent of People Five Years and Over Who Speak a Language Other Than English at Home: 2005 versus 2002

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005 and 2002 American Community Surveys

What language is spoken in those homes? For a majority it’s Spanish. As of 2005, 12% of Americans over the age of 5 were speaking Spanish at home, up from 11.1% in 2002. And the number of states where at least 8% of the population spoke Spanish at home rose to 15% in 2005, up from 12% in 2002.⁴

For the ethnic media this spread between immigrants and native-language speakers is likely to mean two things in particular. First, as these populations spread, it seems probable that small media outlets will arise to serve them. Latinos in particular still tend to congregate, according to demographers, into Spanish-speaking communities. As the number of communities and their size grows, they will probably develop more media. Second, nationally, ethnic broadcast and cable outlets, such as the ones that exist for Spanish-language media users, are also well suited to reach these more dispersed communities.

While those factors suit growth for the ethnic media, there is another current that pulls in the other direction — again especially for Hispanics. Currently 40% of the nation’s Latino population is foreign-born, the group most likely to speak Spanish. But that number is declining.⁵

There are a number of reasons why for the first time in decades growth in the nation’s Latino population came more from birth than from immigration in 2006. Two major reasons are a slowdown in immigration numbers, which has come with the tightening of U.S. borders, and the relative youth of the Latinos already in the U.S. But the net result, more U.S.-born Latinos, has potential ramifications for the Spanish-speaking population and the ethnic media.

U.S.-born Latinos tend to be English-dominant: They watch Spanish-language TV with their parents and English-language TV with their friends, says Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Pew Hispanic Center. Those differences show through in even basic polling questions. In a recent Pew Hispanic Center poll, 81% of U.S.-born Latinos wanted to be interviewed in English; 91% of foreign-born Latinos wanted to be interviewed in Spanish.⁶

Language in Which Latinos Want to be Interviewed

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Pew Hispanic Center

At the end of 2006, the average age for this next generation of Latinos was 15, meaning that in the next five or so years they will be entering their own careers and adult lives apart from their parents. When they go off on their own, will they switch over to largely English-language media, stay mostly with Spanish-language outlets or adopt more of a hybrid, with a bit of each? The decisions this group makes will be critical to the fortunes and growth of the ethnic media.

The language trends are something to watch over the next several years. But 2007 will probably be another good year for the ethnic media in terms of audience growth. According to 2005 data, the latest available, Hispanic publications (the vast majority of which are Spanish-language) rebounded from a rough 2004 with a dramatic reverse in both the number of publications and their readership. And ethnic outlets are spreading as ethnic groups reach into more and more areas. This geographic spread, noted in our section on population, can be tracked, at least where the Hispanic media are concerned.

The Latino Print Network, which tracks the growth of Hispanic media, has seen a marked growth in the number of Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) that are served by Hispanic publications in the last 10 years. (An MSA is defined by the Census Bureau as a large population nucleus, together with adjacent communities that have a high degree of social and economic integration.) In 1995 approximately 80 MSAs were served by Hispanic publications, but by late 2006 there were 130.⁷

Metro Statistical Areas Served by Hispanic Publications

1995 vs. 2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Kirk Whistler

Furthermore, says Kirk Whisler, who collects those numbers for the Latino Print Network, the new publications in those places were weeklies 55% to 60% of the time in 2006. Back in 1995 they were almost entirely “less than weeklies.” The rise of weeklies, as opposed to those that published less often, shows that publishers not only believe Hispanic publications can thrive, but that the populations they serve are big enough, or media-interested enough, to warrant a more regular publishing schedule.⁸

Ethnic Media Audience

Actual audience numbers for the ethnic media are notoriously difficult to track. Outlets are often highly local, serving not cities as much as neighborhoods, with small circulations that are often not audited.

For Spanish-language media, at least, the figures seem to be getting a little more reliable. The number of audited Hispanic publications rose in 2005 across all categories — daily, weekly and less-than-weekly — while the number of Hispanic publications rose as well.⁹

The latest year for which there are data, 2005, was a good one for Hispanic publications. The combined circulation of all Hispanic newspapers (90% of which are Spanish-language) rose to 17.6 million in 2005 from 16.7 million in 2004, according to the Latino Print Network, which represents and sells ads for more than 350 Hispanic print outlets.¹⁰ (It should be noted that most of those figures are unaudited.) That was a reversal from 2004, which, as we noted in last year’s report, saw the first drop since we’d been tracking ethnic media audience. The number, incidentally, is also an all-time high in the records of the Latino Print Network, which go back decades.

And circulation was up with all categories of Hispanic newspapers. Dailies saw a slight increase of 5,000 in circulation overall in 2005. Weeklies’ circulation jumped more than 450,000. Less-than-weeklies climbed by nearly 400,000.¹¹

Hispanic U.S. Daily Newspaper Circulation

Select years 1970-2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Kirk Whisler & Latino Print Network, Carlsbad, CA

The 2005 circulation for the dailies, 1.614 million, is still below the 2003 record of 1.808 million, but that comparison may be deceptive. That 2003 figure is based on the circulation of 40 dailies, but only 14 of those circulations which were audited. The 2005 numbers come from 42 dailies, and half of them, 21, were audited. In other words, there may have been more overstatement in the 2003 figures since the majority of them were self-reported. It’s also worth noting that the 2005 circulation data, while more reliable, still rely heavily on publications that do not audit their numbers.¹²

More weekly and less-than-weekly publications, as we noted earlier, are also auditing their circulations. In 2005, a total of 104 of 350 Hispanic weekly papers had audited their circulations. That compares to 2003, when 76 of 304 were audited. And 17 of 343 less-than-weeklies audited their circulation numbers in 2005. That’s obviously a small percentage, but still better than 2003, when only 8 of 322 less-than-weeklies were audited.¹³ The changes show that the publications are looking to get concrete numbers they can use to publicize themselves, particularly with advertisers. And the number of audits is especially significant for the less-than-weeklies, which are often small community publications that aren’t focused on validating circulation for advertisers. It may be a sign that such publications are lining up more ads, or at least trying to.

Regardless, experts in the field note that even the high end of those audience estimates ultimately equals low penetration of their potential audience. There are, after all, some 41 million Hispanics in the U.S. ¹⁴

Audited and Unaudited Hispanic Newspapers

2003 vs. 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Kirk Whisler & Latino Print Network, Carlsbad, CA

PEJ also monitors the audited circulation of three large Hispanic daily newspapers, from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, as a comparison and checks against the unaudited data the Hispanic publishers collect. With those papers — La Opinion, El Diario and El Nuevo Herald —the trend looked generally flat in 2006, with tiny increases for all three. La Opinion, in Los Angeles, saw its circulation increase from 123,885 in March 2005 to 124,057 in March 2006, an increase of 172 readers.¹⁵ El Nuevo Herald, sister paper of the Miami Herald, climbed to 86,898 from 86,659 (239 more readers)¹⁶ and New York’s El Diario climbed from 50,100 to 50,618, a gain of 518.¹⁷

Audited Circulations of Three Major Spanish-Language Dailies

2001-2006

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Audit Bureau of Circulation, annual audit reports and publishers statements

La Opinion’s circulation numbers have bounced up and down in the years we’ve tracked. While the 2006 numbers were down from the previous year, they were still higher than in 2001. And there was a circulation increase in 2004. For El Diario, the small uptick was the first bump for the paper after four years of steady declines. El Nuevo Herald’s figures have largely held steady in the five years we’ve watched them.

Data on media use among ethnic groups is limited. The usual surveys that focus specifically on the ethnic media were not conducted in 2006. But the biennial Media Consumption Survey done by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press offers insights that indicate Hispanics are not very different from the population at large in their media consumption habits.

According to the Pew survey, 55% of those who identified themselves as being of “Hispanic origin or descent” regularly use a newspaper as a source of news. That number was slightly lower than the survey’s overall number for newspaper use, 59%. Hispanics were also slightly less likely to turn regularly to TV news, according to the survey — 75% of Hispanic respondents compared to 77% over all.¹⁸

The survey also showed that Hispanics were slightly more likely to regularly watch network news than the respondents as a whole — 36% versus 33%. And Hispanics were a bit more likely to turn to the Internet for news than respondents over all — 18% versus 13%.¹⁹

The media habits of Hispanics in the U.S., then, largely mirror the habits of the population as a whole, with only minor variations. And where radio is concerned, Hispanics and the population at large are dead even, with 49% of each group saying they regularly tune in.²⁰ That may be less striking, though, when we remember that the self-identified Hispanics in the survey are not necessarily Spanish-speaking. They are merely of Hispanic descent and could be very much acclimated to American ways of living.

Whatever the shifting demographic makeup of the U.S. means for the ethnic media in the long-term, the short-term outlook is positive. While mainstream print media are suffering economically, Hispanic outlets are still seeing growth, according to data from the Latino Print Network. The growth is smaller than in recent years but a greater bulk of it came from one of the most promising areas—national advertising

Ad dollars over all were up 4.6% in 2005, to $996 million, from $923 million the year before, an increase of $73 million, or 7.9%.¹ That’s close to dead even with 2004’s 8% jump ($69 million), but slightly below the 9% of 2003 (also $69 million). And there were even bigger increases earlier in the decade. Still, the numbers are a healthy increase in an era when print media outlets are hurting.

What’s more, the most significant change in 2005 was where the money was coming from. There was a big jump in national advertising dollars for Hispanic newspapers. About 37% of all their advertising was national in 2005 compared to only 18% in 2004.^{2 3}

National v. Local Ads in Hispanic Newspapers

2003-2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Kirk Whisler & Latino Print Network, Carlsbad, CA

That is by far the highest number on record for national advertising in the Hispanic newspapers. In large part it may be due to the growth of national partnerships, such as Impremedia, a group of established newspapers with readers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago (see Ownership). The Latino Print Network in general and Impremedia in particular were designed to go after the national dollars by creating consortiums for big advertisers to contact about ad buys.

And the growth in those ads is significant. There are limits to how much income can be drawn from only local or primarily local advertisers. There are small businesses that serve ethnic populations in all communities, but larger, formerly local businesses are increasingly part of bigger national chains. Locally owned department stores are a vanishing breed. The Marshall Field’s (Chicago), Hecht’s (Washington) and Hudson’s (Detroit) stores of the world are now Macy’s in name as well as ownership. In many places Starbucks is not only the largest coffee shop chain, it also has more shops in town than several of the next biggest combined. And local supermarkets have a hard time competing with Wal-Mart’s superstores.

In an economy that is increasingly nationalized, media that appeal to national advertisers have an advantage. Big companies can make one ad buy and deal with one sales department that can offer them consumers in several cities. The growth of those national numbers is a good sign for the longer-term health of Spanish-language publications.

Hispanic U.S. Newspaper Ad Revenue

Select years, 1970-2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Kirk Whisler & Latino Print Network, Carlsbad, CA

In another positive sign, the ad increases in 2005 (the most recent year for which there are data) carried through for all the types of the newspapers that LPN measures — daily, weekly and less-than-weekly. Dailies stood out in particular as their dollars grew to $611 million from $566 million — an increase of $45 million, or nearly 8%. Weeklies saw their ad revenue jump in 2005 almost 7%, to $346 million, from $324 million the previous year. Less-than-weeklies grew to $39 million in 2005 from $33 million in 2004, a robust 18%.⁴

Hispanic Newspaper Ad Revenues by Publication Circulation, 2003-2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Kirk Whisler & Latino Print Network, Carlsbad, CA

Other Ethnic Print Media

Like audience figures, economic data are hard to track for many of the ethnic media. Other than Hispanics, who have two national TV networks in Univision and Telemundo and a somewhat nationalized print face in the Latino Print Network, the media for most ethnic groups are scattered and highly localized.

Some ethnic groups are served by large newspapers, as Chinese-Americans are with Sing Tao, which says it has more than 150,000 in circulation with its editions in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. But the paper, which traces its roots back to 1938, is based in Hong Kong, and economic numbers — particularly numbers broken out for the U.S. market — are difficult to find.⁵

Broadcast Outlets

On the broadcast side of the Hispanic media, Univision, which was sold in 2006, is still, by far, the leader. The company had a good 2005 (again the latest data), but not as good as it had seen in recent years, though the fall-off may have stemmed more from FCC actions than from other factors.

Total revenues for 2005 rose $166 million from 2004, an increase of 9%. That was small compared to the $475 million (36%) increase the company had seen in 2004.⁶

The profit picture for 2005 was more worrisome. Net profits (revenues minus expenses) declined 27%, to $187.2 million, from $255.9 million in 2004.⁷

Univision Net Income, 2001-2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Hoover’s Online, http://www.hoovers.com/univision/--ID__51512--/free-co-fin-factsheet.xhtml

The drop of about $69 million was the first decline in net income the company has seen in the new century.

Still, the 2004 figures were exceptional, and despite the drop in Univision’s 2005 profits, the company was ahead of its 2003 figure of $155.5 million.⁸ What’s more, there is every reason to believe that much of the decrease was the result of a Department of Justice requirement: that Univision sell off shares of subsidiary Entravision to decrease its stake to 15%.⁹

Is Univision, a true ethnic media giant, running into limits to its growth because of government regulations, as some mainstream outlets have? Is there a point when the company simply can’t grow much bigger because it has gotten into every market it could?

Heading into 2007, analysts were split on the outlook for Univision. Most stock analysts had moved the company from “strong buy” or “buy” to “hold.” But Goldman Sachs, for instance, still believed the company had many good days ahead. In its first report on the Spanish-language media industry, issued in late 2005, Goldman said that the field’s audience growth left it in the best position to “lead in the monetization opportunity” presented by the nation’s growing Spanish-language audience, particularly because it expected most growth to happen in TV and radio. But the report also said growth “may be less linear” or “lumpier” than in the past, and it did not rate other Spanish-language media properties as buys. Goldman, for instance, gave Entravision a neutral rating. It also said the radio company Spanish Broadcasting Systems, which has stations in denser Hispanic markets such as New York, Los Angeles and Miami, would under-perform because it seemed revenue growth was slowing in part because the markets were saturated.¹⁰

As of 2006, in any case, Univision had become largely immune to some of the bigger issues affecting other broadcast outlets. The network had not witnessed a loss of viewers, and in some markets at some time slots its newscast was the ratings leader. And Univision ended the 2005-2006 television season as the as the fourth-largest broadcast network in prime time among adults 18 to 24, beating NBC, UPN, and WB. Over all, among all audiences it was the nation’s fifth-largest broadcast network, behind ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.¹¹

Economic data for the other big Spanish-language broadcaster, Telemundo, a subsidiary of NBC, were unavailable for 2006. Telemundo’s financial numbers are embedded in the annual report of General Electric, NBC’s parent, but are not separated out.

Hispanic Media Online

Much has been made in the mainstream media of the loss of audience to other more segmented outlets, particularly the Internet. The impact of the Internet on Spanish-language media is not easy to track, but it apparently has had less effect for now on the bottom line or audience. And as noted above, circulation of print outlets has grown and ad revenues, while slowing a bit, are still growing.

But ironically, that isn’t necessarily good news for those Spanish-language media; it could lull them into a false security. Experts in the field told PEJ that there simply aren’t enough ethnic media Web sites, and that the lack of them is one of the bigger concerns the Spanish-language and other ethnic media face. “The ethnic media are five years behind the times when it comes to the Internet,” New America Media’s executive director, Sandy Close, told PEJ at a meeting of ethnic media representatives in Washington. Most ethnic print outlets, NAM’s largest constituent group, do not have a strong Web presence, she says, and they risk losing the next generation of ethnic media consumers. Smaller papers with 15,000 to 20,000 circulation have almost no Web presence at all, says Kevin Weston, NAM’s Director of New Media and Youth Communications.

There may be some long-standing explanations for that lack of interest in the Web, especially for African-Americans and Hispanics. A 2005 Children’s Partnership study found that white and Asian children are twice as likely to have broadband Internet access at home than their African-American and Latino counterparts.¹²

“The impact of the Web is much less marked on Spanish-language print,” Edward Schumacher-Matos, publisher of Rumbo, told PEJ in an e-mail interview “because so many of our readers (first generation) are not online. Their kids are, but that is a different story … Hispanic newspapers, both Spanish and English, are in many ways akin to community papers — we serve a targeted ethnic community — which also aren’t so affected by the Web because the content is exclusive. There aren’t Web sites that offer local news for the Hispanic community, and the national sites are too generic.”

The story of the Spanish-language broadcast media and the Internet, at least where multi-platform giant Univision is concerned, is quite different.

Univision has a strong presence on the Web. For six consecutive years Univision.com has been found to be the Internet’s most-visited Spanish-language in the U.S. by a wide margin. A survey by Simmons Research, a consumer study organization, found that the site has twice the Spanish-dominant and bilingual visitors as Yahoo en Espanol and four times the number of MSN Latino. The survey found that Univision.com scored an average of 11 million unique visitors a month, up from 10 million in 2005.¹³

While those numbers make Univision.com the king of the Spanish-language Web in the U.S., they leave it far behind the most popular English-language sites. Using a random month as a comparison (July 2006), Univision.com wouldn’t even place in the top 50 sites, according to comScore, a company that measures Web traffic.

Top 50 Web Properties, July 2006

Source: comScore Media Metrix

It would finish below ESPN with 17 million unique visitors, You Tube with 16 million and Facebook with 14 million.

But the better comparison might be Yahoo, which scored 129 million visitors, and Google with 103 million. Univision.com is not a news site, it is a full-service Spanish-language portal with front page links for TV, music, shopping, finance, sports and news, among other things. In appearance it may most closely resemble AOL.

That leaves Univision in a good place as audiences transition to the Web, which increasingly is an omnibus provider of services to users.

And Univision’s news site is not an afterthought in the mix. It won a bronze medal at the 2006 North American awards of the Broadcast Designer Association, an organization of professionals in motion graphics, finishing behind CNN and Court TV.

There are still some longer-term economic issues lingering over the Spanish-language media. For instance, what about the rise of small markets that seems to be foretold in the Census data showing the spreading out of ethnic groups? Is that good news for a big broadcaster like Univision? And what will it mean to the smaller print outlets, the kind that often lag in Internet presence, that inevitably will sprout in those places? In the short run, however, rising circulations and viewerships indicate Spanish-language outlets are set to do well.

The biggest shakeup in ethnic media ownership in 2006 — and the biggest for some time — happened on the broadcast side with the well-publicized sale of the TV and radio giant Univision. In September its owner, A. Jerrold Perenchio, sold the network for $12.3 billion to a consortium of investors including the media mogul Haim Saban.¹

Perenchio, who purchased the Spanish-language broadcaster in 1992, was always something of an odd fit as a media titan. While he had owned a few Spanish-language TV stations in New York and Los Angeles, he was mostly known as a fight promoter. Univision was seen as primarily an investment for him to be sold when the time was right. At 74, he was ready to cash in. But the sale failed to draw a large-scale bidding war, surprising many.

Considering the growth of the nation’s Latino population (see Audience) and the group’s growing buying power, estimated to be roughly $480 billion annually, interest was expected to be high.² But the scenario that many watchers considered most likely, a big bid from the Mexican TV giant Grupo Televisa, didn’t materialize before the June deadline. The delay was reportedly due to a dispute with its investment partner in the deal, the Carlyle Group, over how much they would offer for Univision.

Instead, a bid of about $10.7 billion from the Saban group, a collection of private investors, sat alone on the table. After the deadline, Grupo Televisa finally put forward a bid with a different group of investors that was slightly higher. Saban’s group raised its offer to over $12 billion and eventually the sale was approved at a September 27 Univision board meeting.

The sale created hard feelings between Univision and Grupo Televisa, which not only owned 11% of Univision but provided the network with roughly a third of its prime-time programming.³ After the sale Grupo announced its intention to sell its holdings in Univision and use the proceeds from that sale to look for new business opportunities in the U.S. without Univision — hinting that the network could be left with a large hole in its primetime lineup. Univision quickly fired back that it has exclusive U.S. broadcasting rights for all Grupo content running through 2017. But would those agreements cover online programming, reportedly an option Grupo was considering? That question presumably will be sorted out in the coming year.

Regardless of what happens in the Grupo Univision spat, the bigger question for the Spanish-language media is why was there such lack of interest in a network that reaches 99% of U.S. Hispanic homes?⁴

Some analysts believe the company might have gotten more interest if Perenchio had been willing to split it up and sell its pieces. Perenchio and the firm conducting the auction reportedly did not want that more complicated kind of sale. But over all, analysts have not been particularly high on the company. Of 10 different analysts who have evaluated Univision since August 2005, only one, J.P. Morgan, upgraded its opinion of the company, moving Univision in June from “underweight” to “neutral.”⁵

Despite the nation’s increasing Latino population, analysts and potential investors see longer-term demographic trends with the next generation of Hispanics and wonder about the future of the Spanish-language media. If indeed the next generation of Latinos — a group with an average age of 15 today that will be on their own soon (see Audience) — decide when they leave home that they would rather tune into English-language programming, Univision’s audience and income numbers could plunge.

There is no guarantee, though, of how demographic forecasts will play out. That next generation could remain bilingual and watch and listen to programming in both languages. And Univision’s value has been underestimated before. In 1992, Perenchio and his investment partners bought the struggling Univision for $550 million from Hallmark; 14 years later Perenchio earned a sizable return.⁶

The other big broadcast company owner, NBC, seems to be trying to figure out what it wants to do with its property Telemundo. Faced with slumping ratings, Telemundo announced in the fall of 2006 that it was considering launching a network in Mexico to compete with the two broadcast networks that already exist there.

Also in the fall, NBC announced it was going to cut staff at all its TV properties, including Telemundo. And the network said it was planning to eliminate local Telemundo newscasts in large markets — Houston (4), Dallas (6), San Antonio (7), San Jose (8) and Phoenix (9) — and replace them with a hubbed newscast out of Fort Worth.⁷ Critics have charged that the move stands in contrast to what NBC promised when it purchased the network in 2001. Then the company said it would give Telemundo “the resources to compete effectively with Univision.” But as many Hispanic newspapers have discovered in recent years, an English-language owner with deep pockets does not always mean good times are ahead. As we noted in last year’s report, the sale of the Knight-Ridder chain left some of the company’s Spanish-language papers in a difficult position. In San Jose, Nuevo Mundo was closed and replaced by a paper imported from Mexico. In Miami, McClatchy, which bought much of the Knight-Ridder chain, held on to El Nuevo Herald.

Over all, the ownership issues on the print side of the Hispanic media were quieter than their broadcast counterparts.

ImpreMedia, the Hispanic ownership group that was created in 2004 when one owner combined La Opinion in Los Angles, El Diario in New York and La Raza in Chicago, used 2006 to again extend its national reach and began to leverage its strength as a national group to target more national advertising.

In January of 2006, the group purchased La Prensa, a free weekly in central Florida with a circulation of 50,000.⁸ And in mid-2006, Impremedia began selling advertising for special themed “packages” in weekly editions of some of its papers — supplements that featured special editorial content on specific themes like back-to-school and new cars. That approach, often used by mainstream English-language media to generate ad dollars at times when specific advertisers are looking to reach readers (see Newspapers section), shows an advantage of Impremedia’s nationalized ownership.

And in October, ImpreMedia announced it was launching La Vibra, a weekend entertainment supplement that would appear in its papers in six markets — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Orlando and Tampa. La Vibar seeks readers among young urban Latinos with music and movie coverage. Why have a separate issue for those topics? As the alternative weeklies have found, there are big national advertisers looking to target a younger crowd that goes out for the evening — liquor and tobacco companies in particular as well as film and music makers. La Vibra gives those advertisers a way to target the Hispanic subset of that group.⁹

Meanwhile, not all Spanish-language papers affiliated with mainstream owners are suffering. McClatchy invested more heavily in 2006 in Vida en el Valle, its free weekly published in the San Joaquin Valley of California. In February, the company vastly increased the paper’s home delivery numbers, to more than 130,000 from about 80,000. The publisher also increased the number of copies left for “public access” in various locations to about 40,000 from 27,000. The paper’s free circulation went from 108,000 to more than 170,000 in one week.¹⁰

In other words, many of the benefits of being owned by a big mainstream owner still exist, but such ownership leaves outlets to the whims of their corporate overseeers.

Another ownership model for the Spanish-language media is being tested in Texas. In 2004, Edward Schumacher Matos, a journalist and businessman, launched the Rumbo chain of four papers from scratch in different metro areas — Austin, Houston, San Antonio and McAllen/Brownsville. Rumbo has struggled at times, and when its first group of investors pulled out in 2005, the papers had to find a different source for funding, which it did.

But 2006 created new challenges. In March, the chain suspended its Austin edition and cut its other editions back to three days a week from five days a week. The chain portrayed the moves as a new strategy “tailored to meet the needs of readers and advertisers,” but no newspaper wants to scale back, and the cuts indicate Rumbo may be in trouble.

What’s more, the company announced in January 2007 that Rumbo editions in Houston and San Antonio would scale back their publication to once a week from three days a week. And at the same time founder Edward Schumacher Matos announced he was stepping down as chairman and CEO of the company as of January 15, 2007, though he would stay on as an adviser.

As much as it is difficult to make any kind of broad statement about the ethnic media, that is probably doubly true for its online components. There’s little information available on traffic or investment, and the great appeal for ethnic groups where the Web is concerned — the fact that users in one country can get information from sites based in others that may be thousands of miles away — makes tracking things even more difficult.

For many groups, particularly those from more distant places, the Web presents a way to connect with even more news and events back home. Consider that three of the top 10 Web sites in the world are Chinese. according to the Web traffic-measuring service Alexa. How many of the visitors to those sites (Baidu.com, Qq.com and Sina.com) are based in the U.S.? No one can say for sure.

The one exception in this area is Hispanic media, for which there are some audience data.

Hispanics are a diverse group hailing from many nations. The term also describes a U.S. population that spans those who have been here for generations, those who are recent immigrants, and those here only temporarily. Some speak English fluently, others hardly at all.

The diversity of the population is clearly reflected in the way Hispanics use the Web. There are big differences between “Hispanics” as a whole and “Spanish-dominant” Hispanics (those who primarily rely on Spanish). For instance, the list of the top 10 Web sites visited by U.S. Hispanics looks a lot like the top 10 Web properties for the U.S as a whole, according to comScore.

Top 10 Web Properties for the U.S. Hispanic Audience

Source: comScore

Top 10 Web Properties for the U.S. Population as a Whole

Source: comScore

The biggest difference in those two charts is the appearance of Apple Computer on the Hispanic list (presumably because of iTunes) and the appearance of Viacom on the more general U.S. population list. But on the whole they match up fairly closely. Now compare those top Hispanic Web properties with the top sites for in the U.S. as identified by a 2006 survey by the research firm Experion Simmons.

Top 10 Spanish-language Web Sites
Sites visited in the 'last 30 days' by users

Source: Experion Simmons

While Yahoo is tops in the comScore ratings for U.S. Hispanics overall and for the U.S. as a whole, for Spanish-language users Espanol.Yahoo.com is fourth. The top three slots are occupied by Univision and Telemundo (the two big Spanish-language TV networks) and Terra.com, a Spanish-language portal. And while AOL is not a top 10 site with Hispanic Web users in general, Latino.AOL.com is No. 6 on the Spanish-language list. For the most part, the Spanish-language versions of U.S. brands do not fare as well as others designed exclusively for this audience.

The Spanish-language user list is also particularly diverse. Not all the top 10 sites, for instance, are delivered in Spanish. HispanicVista.com, No. 9, is a site that features commentary from and about Hispanics, but is written in English. Migente, No. 10, is a Spanish-language social networking site. And CNNEspanol.com, which appears on the Spanish-language list at No. 8, is the only pure news site on either list.

What Web sites do Hispanics turn to specifically for news? For the Spanish-language users, it is hard to know. The Experion Simmons survey of Spanish-language Internet users did not ask specifically about news. CNNEspanol is the highest pure news site on the list, but others like Univision and Telemundo offer news along with other content, and we don’t know which of these pages users visit.

For the broader group of Hispanics, ComScore does gather data specifically on news sites. Again the numbers look a lot like the figures for the U.S. population as whole. The list actually contains the same sites with some slight re-ordering.

Top General News Sites For the U.S. Hispanic Population, Decemeber 2006

Source: comScore

Top General News Sites For the U.S. Population as a Whole, Decemeber 2006

Source: comScore

Yahoo sits atop both lists. The sites of the newspapers in the nation’s biggest Spanish-language print media conglomerate ImpreMedia — which includes La Opinion in Los Angeles and ElDiario in New York — rank far down the comScore list at 23.

The finding that Hispanics—many of whom have been in the country for longer than the smaller group of Spanish-language users — tend to gravitate to English-language media supports much of what we found about the audience for print and television. It also may raise longer-term questions about the strength of the Spanish-language media as the next generation of Hispanics, an extremely sizable one, comes of age and moves out on its own — in some cases away from Spanish-language-dominant homes. And that trend will be going on, according to demographers, as the number of foreign-born Hispanics, those most likely to speak the language, is declining.

Is the biggest difference between Spanish- and English-language sites the language? Or are there other inherent differences in the design and features that might influence a user’s choice? PEJ looked at 39 English-language sites for this 2007 report and inventoried their features and content and then later added two of the biggest Spanish-language TV sites, Univision, and one of the best-known newspaper sites, La Opinion, to get a feel for their offerings.

La Opinion

The Web site of the largest U.S.-based newspaper was honored in October 2006 as the top site for a Spanish-language publication, according to an El Salvadoran firm — the first time a U.S. publication won the award. What earned the site that designation?

From our inventory, laopinion.com places most emphasis on the content. There is a lot of information here, including the latest wire stories from U.S. and foreign wire services, copy from the day’s paper, and special photo galleries.

The site also has a different orientation than many English-language news sites. U.S. news is still covered here, but it is through a different prism than mainstream English-language news sites. For instance, on the afternoon of January 24th, the day after the president’s State of the Union speech as the Congress was debating Iraq policy, the site led with an AP wire piece on the stalling of the minimum-wage bill in the Senate. The bill, which failed that day to get the 60 votes needed for cloture, was news on English-language sites as well, but well down the page, after stories about the Iraq debate and the president. The lead story under laopinion.com’s “Primera Pagina” (Front Page) header from that day’s paper was about Bush’s speech, but focused tightly on the president’s immigration proposals. “Irak” (Iraq) didn’t appear until the end of the story’s fourth paragraph.

There are also links the page to the other newspapers in the ImpreMedia group, the U.S. publisher that owns Spanish-language papers around the country. Those sites suggest that though the papers have one owner, each has its own design.

Laopinion.com is not all that high-tech. The link to its RSS feed is far down the page, and the site didn’t offer any podcasts or a homepage that users could rearrange as they saw fit. Its use of multimedia was a little more advanced, with several video and photo viewing options. It’s worth noting, however, that the video here is not from La Opinion but from the AP, and in English.

An aspect of the page that stood out was its advertisements — there were only two, but they were big and prominently placed. A large ad sat next to the page’s lead story and equaled it in size. Another ad ran in a long column just under the top ad.

Laopinion.com offers readers the Spanish-language equivalent of what most English-language newspaper sites offer, but with a different focus for a different audience.

Univision

Univision.com is, according to survey data, the most popular Spanish-language Web site by far. While there are no figures on how many users go to its news pages, some significant level of traffic seems fair to assume.

What do those visitors find there? A national Spanish-language news site that focuses on issues affecting Hispanics around the country and the world.

On its news page users get a mix of news broken down by region (even by city) and resources that are aimed squarely at Spanish-speakers. Like the site for La Opinion, Univision.com is squeezed into the center 2/3 of the screen. It follows a three-column format that has navigation on the left of the page, a lead story in the center with other stories under it, and a right column with things like photo slide shows and videos.

And beginning with the heavier use of videos — 20 of them on the home page, all in Spanish — several differences from La Opinoin’s site stand out. In addition to the slides and video, the site offers a news blog high on the page.

Customization is a low priority here, with an RSS link at the bottom of the page and no podcast options. And the site is also more commercial than La Opinion’s, with several prominent ads on the page, including one in the right column that is bigger than the page’s lead item.

The content on the site is also broader than that on the Los Angeles-based Hispanic newspaper site. Local U.S. news is available through a menu that lets users jump to the local Univision news page of any one of 18 U.S. cities. And under that, but still high on the page, there is a list of “Recursos” (Resources) for users that include information on and links to U.S. government sites and to a page with several different kinds of calculators to help with finances and forms for immigration.

Immigration also has its own news topic header, the top header, indeed, under Noticias at the top of the page, followed by U.S., Mexico, Latin America, World and Weather.

There is also Latin American news that would likely be hard to find featured on English-language news sites. On the morning of January 25, the lead item on the Noticias page was a wire story questioning the validity of Fidel Castro’s signature on a letter the Cuban leader had reportedly written to at President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. The story did not even appear on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post sites. And while most of the stories from the U.S. section are from Univison’s online staff, or a combination of staff and wire, the stories from other regions tend to be wire copy.

Univision.com’s news site is a hybrid, part breaking news page, part multimedia center and part user help center. In that sense, the differences between it and those of most English-language sites extends well beyond language.

The data show that the nation’s new immigrant populations are fanning out around the country, their numbers growing in new places. But what of the role of the ethnic media in these new frontiers? Do ethnic media outlets serve different functions in them? And how are the spreading ethnic groups using their media?

At PEJ’s request, the pollster Sergio Bendixen went back through the massive ethnic-media-consumption survey he conducted in 2005 to see how ethnic groups in the 10 states with established ethnic populations — Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada and Texas — compared with the those in the rest of the country. He reran the numbers on the two ethnic groups with large populations around the country, Hispanics and Asians.

The findings? First, there are differences in the ways the two ethnic groups use their media, depending on whether they live in established or emerging communities. Second, those differences also vary depending on the ethnic group examined.

The differences between Hispanics and Asians apparent in a broad national sample grow even starker when split into established and emerging communities.

Hispanics, who tend to rely more on native-language media overall, do so even more in emerging communities than in established ones. Asians, on the other hand, tend to rely more on English-language outlets in emerging communities than they do in established ones.

Consider the figures for newspapers. In established communities, Hispanics are split fairly evenly between those who read the paper mostly in English or mostly in Spanish — 27% in English, 28% in Spanish. But in emerging communities a much larger number, 36%, read in Spanish, versus 19% in English.¹

Asians, in contrast, are more likely to read newspapers in English generally, but that tendency is even greater in emerging communities. In established communities, 43% mostly read English-language newspapers and 24% mostly read papers in an Asian language. But in emerging Asian communities that disparity grows dramatically to 59% who read a paper in English and only 14% who read one in an Asian language).²

In What Language Do You Mostly Read the Newspaper?

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Unreleased poll data from Sergio Bendxien and Associates

What accounts for these differences? One explanation is that the emerging ethnic immigrant communities are more likely to have a higher percentage of new immigrants who do not yet speak English. They would be more likely to have to rely on media in their native language.

But why then do Asians rely more heavily on English newspapers in emerging areas?

There are a few possible answers. It may be that Asians who come to the U.S. and move to more removed communities are farther along in their education, with some background in English. It’s also possible that those figures reflect the fact that the Asian media in the U. S. aren’t as developed as the Hispanic media, and as Asian groups move to emerging communities there simply isn’t as much Asian-language material available. In other words, they may be using English-language papers because that’s all they have.

That possibility is supported when one compares the number of Hispanic and Asian-language media outlets in the U.S. New California Media’s National Ethnic Media Directory that lists 128 pages of Hispanic media outlets versus only 83 pages of Asian media outlets. And those Asian outlets have to be further broken down into constituent languages. For instance there are only 23 pages of Korean media outlets in the directory and seven pages of Vietnamese outlets.³

The findings regarding established and emerging ethnic communities and newspapers hold true when Asians are asked about TV as well. In established communities 49% watch TV in English and 17% watch in an Asian language, while in emerging communities the number watching in English jumps to 58%, while the number watching in an Asian language drops to 12%.⁴

In What Language Do You Mostly Watch TV?

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Unreleased poll data from Sergio Bendxien and Associates

Ethnic radio, which really needs a dense population to survive, shows the biggest difference among Asians. In established communities 50% of Asians listen to radio mostly in English, but that number jumps to 73% in emerging communities. At the same time the number of Asians who say they mostly listen to Asian-language radio drops from 21% in established communities to 5% in emerging ones.⁵

In What Language Do You Mostly Listen to Radio?

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Unreleased poll data from Sergio Bendxien and Associates

The real test for the differences in media preferences between established and emerging ethnic communities, however, is probably the Internet. While there are always questions about the Internet access people have, once they gain access there are no questions about whether ethnic media are available. The Internet is the same in Los Angeles as it is in Dubuque. There may not be local Web content, but even if there isn’t the Internet offers a host of ethnic media alternatives to those in areas where the ethnic media are less established.

What do the Internet data show? That people living in emerging ethnic communities, whether Hispanics or Asians, are bigger users of ethnic Web sites than those in established communities.

Among Hispanics in established communities who use the Internet, 40% regularly visit Hispanic or Spanish-language Web sites, but that number jumps to 61% in emerging communities. And among Asians, 47% of those in established communities regularly visit Asian-language sites, but the figure increases to 60% for those living in emerging communities.⁶

Percentage of Asians and Hispanics Who Visit Ethnic Web Sites 'Regularly'

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Unreleased poll data from Sergio Bendxien and Associates

Taken together, those survey findings seem to indicate a few things. First, emerging ethnic populations, on the whole, are probably more reliant on and interested in ethnic outlets than their cohorts in established communities. Second, those emerging communities are probably not served as well as they could or should be. If there are areas for ethnic-media growth in the coming years, it may be the emerging communities. And third, the best way to reach such populations may be TV, particularly cable TV, and the Internet.

Until the emerging communities grow bigger, those media, and especially the Internet, will remain the ethnic outlets their populations use most. And as ethnic populations continue to spread out, bringing with them new immigrants, the ethnic media that do the best may be the ones that develop a national strategy that can reach into such areas. The new audiences want ethnic media; the question is how to get it to them.

Considering its long history and the size of its target audience, one might expect the black press to be the biggest and most advanced of the ethnic media in the U.S. Some outlets have been in existence for 40, 50, 60 years or longer. The oldest papers were founded more than a century ago. And some form of the black press has existed since 1827.¹ The papers represent and serve a large established population. And there are several large, dense communities around the country to target.

Even so, the black press is not nearly as organized as the Spanish-language press; it has been slow to adapt to online technology, and its audience appears to be aging and waning. The lack of unification among the black press outlets leaves little hard data to analyze, but those who study the press offer some insights as to where the industry is going.

They argue that there are two primary challenges for the black press, though they are somewhat interconnected. First, the audience, like the one for mainstream newspapers, seems to be aging. And, second, many of the papers have been slow to establish an online presence.

Kevin Watson, an editor at New American Media, sees the problems as two sides of the same coin. The papers’ slowness in creating Web sites is costing them younger readers, while at the same time distribution centers for the print product, such as churches — also miss the younger demographic.

On the whole the black press has been slow to adapt to a changing world, says DC Livers, managing editor of blackpress.org, which is part of the Historical Black Press Foundation. She says papers have not worked to audit their circulations, so advertisers don’t know exactly what they getting. Her group is hoping to remedy that problem by pushing several more publications to be audited within the next year.

Among the few papers that do audit circulation, how do the trends look? Not good, according to research by PEJ. We ran the names of several scores of African-American newspapers through the database of the Audit Bureau of Circulations and only three yielded a result: New York’s Amsterdam News, the Philadelphia Tribune and the Baltimore Afro-American.

Between 2002 and 2006, the New York paper saw a steep decline in circulation, while the Baltimore and Philadelphia papers were essentially flat.

Circulation of Selected African-American Newspapers

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Audit Bureau of Circulation, annual audit reports and publisher’s statements

The Amsterdam News, a weekly, fell to 13,175 in 2006 from 18,711 in 2004 – the last audit period. That is a decline of almost 30%. The biggest decline came in single-copy sales of the paper, which fell to 10,487 in 2006 from 14,298 in 2004.²

The Philadelphia Tribune, which publishes three days a week, lost a small number of readers, but was basically unchanged. For the purpose of this study PEJ averaged the three days’ circulation. The 2006 circulation figure for the Tribune was 11,559, just under the 2004 figure of 11,638, a decline of less than 1%.³

The Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly, was essentially flat. The paper’s circulation climbed to 11,224 in 2006, up from 11,180 in 2004, again less than 1%.⁴

Flat and declining circulations are not something new in print journalism, of course. Mainstream outlets have seen both. But the more telling aspect of those figures lies in the size of the numbers themselves in the context of the African-American populations involved. There are more than 2 million black people in New York City, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 620,000 in Philadelphia and almost 400,000 in Baltimore.⁵

Those papers, then, take in only a fraction of the African-American populations. Why are the figures so low?

Several traits work against the industry. The target readership already speaks English and can turn to any number of other print outlets — something not true with native-language ethnic outlets. And the fact that most of these publications are weekly — or at least less than daily — means they are not really meant as a replacement for other print media.

They exist as supplements to other news, ways to get other views. And those are the kinds of outlets that are suffering in the new media world. Surveys show that audiences are devoting steady or declining amounts of time to news consumption, while at the same time there are more outlets than ever — many of them online — competing for the news consumer’s attention. Print outlets, particularly supplemental ones, often take a hit.

The numbers might also reflect the success of African-Americans in the U.S. As the group becomes more and more a part of the mainstream culture, it may be that blacks don’t feel the desire to read publications aimed specifically at them. They may feel just as comfortable turning to mainstream outlets. It could also be, however, that most of the readers of the black press come from an older demographic, one in particular with roots in the nation’s civil rights struggles. The black press’s heyday came in the early 1960s as the civil rights movements was growing, but not yet covered seriously in the mainstream press. But as the mainstream press turned on to the story, the readership of the black press declined to a smaller core. As those readers grow older and die off, their numbers are not being replenished by younger readers.

That doesn’t mean the audience for the papers is undesireable. The National Newspaper Publishers Association, a group of black press publishers, estimates its 15 million readers have more than $570 million in buying power. With an average age of about 44, they are still not as old as mainstream newspaper readers, who average 55 years. The group also says 90% of its readers are high school graduates, with 6 in 10 having attended college.⁶

But in the end the black press seems to be facing problems similar to those of mainstream newspapers — declining and aging audiences — combined with a smaller audience to start with. The long-term prospects for those papers may well hinge on their ability to get online quickly.

The online world, which is defined less by geography than by interest group, may be well suited to black publications. Some African-American Web sites report high traffic numbers. BlackPlanet.com, a social networking news Web site, has more than 15 million registered members. Blackamericaweb.com, a site founded by the popular morning DJ Tom Joyner, reports 30,000 unique visitors a day.⁷

In fact, while the black press has suffered, black radio, particularly in the case of Joyner, has thrived. His show, a mix of comedy and commentary, is syndicated in roughly 120 markets and reaches some 8 million listeners. And it has had some major personalities on air including Senator Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Bill Clinton. The show is seen as a powerful force in the black community — an identity the black press would like to re-establish.

As more and more people on online and develop habits, the sooner the black press needs to focus on getting online and building audience. Such a move might help in its effort to reclaim its place.