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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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102389
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10238900.043
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1990-09-22
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PRESS, Page 114Dancing to the Latino BeatHispanic media reach a vast audience but lag with advertisersBy Leslie Whitaker
The Cubans are coming! The Cubans are coming! That is the
battle cry these days of angry Mexican Americans in the Los Angeles
area. The target of their wrath: local TV station KVEA, an
affiliate of Telemundo, the Spanish-language television network
that hit the airwaves two years ago. Although West Coast Chicanos
were at first delighted to tune into broadcasts in their own
language, some gradually became alarmed at what they call the
"Cubanization" of KVEA, which picks up much of its programming from
Telemundo's operations center near Miami. "The programming does not
reflect the linguistic, cultural and ethnic communities in which
these programs are shown," complains Raul Ruiz, professor of
Chicano studies at California State University at Northridge, who
has led numerous small demonstrations in front of the station's
Glendale offices during the past four months.
The dispute illustrates how difficult it is for the broadcast
and print media to build a national following among U.S. Hispanics,
a geographically scattered group comprising many nationalities.
"It's hard to cover all the Hispanic markets because they are so
different," says Joel Russell, former senior editor of Hispanic
Business. "A publication has to have one article about Chicanos in
Texas, one about Cubans in Florida, one about Puerto Ricans in New
York. It's too nebulous a focus."
Nonetheless, Hispanics, expected to become the country's
largest minority early in the next century, are being courted by
a record number of publications and television news shows. Roughly
145 Spanish-language newspapers and magazines are published in the
U.S. In addition, there are some 30 bilingual or English-language
publications aimed at Hispanic readers. More than 200 radio
stations and approximately 50 television stations broadcast some
news and talk shows in Spanish. Their potential audience is vast:
the Hispanic-American community totals 23 million and is growing
faster than the general population.
Encouraged by those burgeoning numbers, some American
corporations have been eagerly pumping money into a market that
once consisted mainly of lackluster small-circulation Spanish
dailies. In 1988 the Hallmark greeting-card company bought
Univision, the largest Spanish-language network in the U.S., from
a Mexican media conglomerate for nearly $600 million. The year
before, Saul Steinberg's Reliance Group formed rival network
Telemundo, which teamed up with CNN to produce a competing evening
national news broadcast.
Large newspapers are also trying to cash in on the trend: the
Miami Herald has considered circulating its daily Spanish edition
nationally; the Los Angeles Times plans to make its twice-monthly
Spanish insert a weekly next year. Twenty-four dailies carry Vista,
an English-language Sunday insert (partly owned by Time Warner)
aimed at Hispanic readers.
Many Hispanic journalists with established careers in the
so-called mainstream press are attracted to these ventures because
of the opportunity to focus exclusively on the Latino community.
Guillermo Martinez, a Cuban who was senior editor of the Miami
Herald, left to join Univision, where he heads the news department.
Univision anchorwoman and producer Teresa Rodriguez has turned down
offers from Good Morning, America and two NBC affiliates,
preferring to cover Hispanic America in depth.
While these journalists share a commitment to cover Latin
communities here and abroad, they are divided over which language
is the most effective vehicle for reaching their audience. Manuel
Casiano, founder of the Puerto Rican magazine Imagen, favors
Spanish, noting that 97% of Hispanic adults living in the U.S.
today learned that language first. Arturo Villar, founder of Vista,
and Alfredo Estrada, publisher of the upscale monthly Hispanic,
argue that clinging to their native language holds Hispanics back.
The effect of publishing in Spanish, Estrada says, "is to support
a Spanish-speaking subclass that will always be flipping hamburgers
for a living." Some news outlets try to appeal to the broadest
audience by using both languages.
By far the biggest challenge for the Hispanic media is winning
over advertisers who question the value and size of their audience.
"Corporate America thinks of some poor guy living in a barrio who
just came over the border," complains Estrada, who claims that half
his readers make $40,000 or more annually. To combat skepticism
about their ratings, rivals Univision and Telemundo last summer
jointly hired Nielsen Media Research, the television ratings
service, to verify their claims. Advertising dollars aimed at
Hispanics peaked at $550 million last year, according to Hispanic
Business, a fraction of the national total of $125 billion. "We are
nowhere," admits Telemundo president Henry Silverman. But Imagen's
Casiano is decidedly more upbeat: "The numbers show tremendous
potential for growth." In other words, there is nowhere to go but
up.