Posts Tagged: broadcast
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More FM Radio Stations Broadcast in Spanish
The statistics have prompted many Midwestern stations to switch to Spanish or bilingual programming, according to NBC.
"[Latinos are] the only growing population that exists in those markets, and there was nothing for them," Murray Hill Broadcasting director of advertising Josh Guttman said.
Cleveland was one of the most recent to convert a station, and as of Jan. 1, 87.7 FM La Mega WLFM-LV began playing Latino music. The Hispanic population has increased by 63 percent to about 10 percent of Cleveland's total population in Cleveland.
And a majority of that population includes radio-listeners, according to Nielsen statistics. Over 93 percent of the U.S.' Hispanic population, about 40 million people, listen to the radio for more than 12 hours a week, according to the Nielsen data.
But they aren't the only ones listening to the music on Spanish language stations.
"I honestly think music has no language," said Daniel Melendez, programming director of La Mega's parent company, TSJ Media, told NBC.
He said that a large portion of the audience may not understand Spanish, but that doesn't deter them from tuning in.
"We want everybody to listen and appreciate the station and be part of it, and that's very hard to do when you're talking about so many different types of music and cultures," Guttman said.
Even states like Wisconsin are seeing a growth in their Hispanic population.
"It's such a good way to be in touch with a high [portion] of the population," said Romilia Schlueter, an El Salvador native living in Madison, Wisconsin, who works at La Movida radio station.
The number of Spanish stations grew from about 500 to more than 800 in 2012, but some reports as recently as May estimate more than 1,000, according to NBC.
Source: Published originally on LatinPost as More FM Radio Stations Broadcast in Spanish in Response to Growing Latino Populations,July 20, 2014.
Reaching Latinos: Media vies for a winning formula
Take CNN's latest attempt at a Spanish-language broadcast targeting U.S Latinos. The broadcaster is no newcomer to the Spanish-speaking world, for decades reaching Latin America with CNN en Espanol. But the company said it axed its CNN Latino domestic Spanish-language service after one year because it failed "to fulfill our business expectations."
NBC's attempt at a website called NBC Latino folded in January after 16 months, despite producing thousands of original stories. Even the much-heralded Fusion — a joint venture of Univision and ABC — is still experiencing growing pains, shedding several programs in its first year and restructuring its nightly news show from five days a week to one.
One challenge: Many in the audience today are second- and third-generation Latinos, and often they eschew a Latino-only box, even as they crave more stories that include them.
MSNBC Executive Producer Chris Pena saw the challenges firsthand in guiding NBC Latino. From the start, he said, there was debate whether to create a stand-alone site for English-speaking Latinos. NBC has since rolled its Latino content into a page within its broader revamped news site, albeit with fewer reporters but wider distribution.
Survivors have emerged and show staying power, Fusion among them. Among Latino-focused websites and TV networks born in recent years, several are still standing: HuffPost Latino Voices; VOXXI's independent news site for Latinos, Fox News Latino, focusing on the domestic English-speaking Latino market; and Mundo Fox with world news in Spanish.
Then there's the long-running NPR program Latino USA, in its 20th year. It expanded to an hour-long magazine last year after host Maria Hinojosa decided to produce the show independently.
Hinojosa says reaching Latinos is just about reaching people.
"We don't sit here and intentionally say, 'Well, we have a Mexican piece, a Dominican piece.' But we are spanning the conversation for people my age, and people who are younger," she said. "We're not only doing journalism, we're also doing storytelling."
In recent months, the popular website Buzzfeed also has noticeably upped the caliber and number of its Hispanic-related stories.
But American audiences are more fragmented than ever, meaning when it comes to Latinos, media companies and their advertisers are often pursuing a slice of a market slice.
Millennials — adults in their mid-30s and younger — and even Gen Xers — those between about 35 and 50 — are finding content differently, favoring mobile devices over TVs or desktop computers. That's especially true in the Latino market where the average age is 27, compared to 42 for non-Latino white Americans.
Source: Published originally on The Miami Herald as Reaching Latinos: Media vies for a winning formula by Laura Wides-Munoz, AP Hispanic Affairs Writer, April 3, 2014.
Bilingual future for California's Spanish-language media?
New America Media reports that after nearly a decade of serving the Central Valley, the Spanish-language weekly El Sol De Visalia, printed its last edition in late December. The newspaper, which was published by the Gannett-owned Visalia Delta Times, had not been faring well in the economic downturn, according to Eduardo Stanley, its editor since 2006.
In the state's Central Valley, home to a large concentration of Spanish-speaking communities, El Sol's closure is not an isolated case. In the last decade, a string of corporate owned as well as smaller, independent publications have closed their doors, a phenomenon that has jolted Spanish-language media publishers and editors to embrace more bilingual and bicultural content.
A boom in Spanish-language papers in the Valley in the last two decades - largely owned by English-language newspaper chains, Stanley said, turned into a bust in the recent recession. The Sacramento Bee's La Voz, The Stockton Record's El Tiempo, and The Modesto Bee's El Sol were all shuttered in the last decade.
In 2007, the downward spiral continued with the closure of the weekly Las Noticias del Valle of Hanford, which was published by the Hanford Sentinel. The following year, El Mexicalo of Bakersfield, an independently-published newspaper, shut down because of advertising losses. And most Latino media in the Valley that have managed to stay in business, have made significant reductions in their staff and the number of pages they publish.
Spanish language broadcast media have also suffered. According to Stanley, in 2006, 20 Spanish language radio stations could be heard, just in the Fresno area, but now he says there are only a few.
For their long-term sustainability, more Spanish-language publishers are incorporating English-language content into their pages - a move that reflects the region's changing demographics, despite a robust Latino population.
Incorporating English: 'A Tool For Survival'
Nearly 30 years ago, Raul Camacho Sr. founded El Popular, an independent, weekly in Bakersfield, with the intention of publishing solely in Spanish. But his son, George Camacho, the paper's publisher, says he sees incorporating English as an essential "tool for survival," and said his father has begun realizing that as well.
"He sees the changes we've been experiencing and he's opening up more to change," Camacho said, noting the significant demographic shifts in the region.
According to the 2010 Census, more than half of Californians under the age of 18 are Latino. The group accounts for 90 percent of the state's overall growth over the last 10 years, and currently make up 38 percent of the state's residents. In the Valley, that number is even higher. Fresno's Latino population stands at 47 percent, Bakersfield's at 45 percent, Stockton's at 40 percent, and Merced's at nearly 50 percent.
"Immigration is slowing down, the Hispanics are younger and they're bilingual," Camacho said. "Their parents are aging, the population is aging, so our demographics are getting younger and younger and for us to survive, we have to adapt to that."
Camacho says he hopes a younger readership will help the paper to woo more advertisers. "We'd be engaging younger audiences," he said. "And if we do that, the advertising will come."
Kirk Whisler, president of Carlsbad, Calif.-based Latino Print Media said that Latino media have been shifting toward incorporating bilingual and bicultural content.
"The Latino (print media) market isn't a Spanish market, it isn't an English market," he said. "It is a bilingual market and that person out there is going to sit and choose what they want based on what's being offered to them. Language is almost secondary," he said.
How Bilingual Has Worked Well
For Juan Esparza, editor of the Fresno Bee-owned (McClatchy Co.) bilingual newspaper Vida En El Valle, producing bilingual content is critical to engaging the Latino community and retaining a healthy readership.
Vida en el Valle has been "bilingual since day one," in 1990, Esparza said. The newspaper, while "it has shrunk by 20 percent in the past two years," has a circulation of over 170,000 copies distributed weekly, and is 65 percent in English and 35 percent in Spanish.
"I think we were a little ahead of the curve in deciding to become bilingual as a Latino publication, but I think that's important," Esparza said. Otherwise, he said, "you're not going to reach a monolingual English speaker who has been here three or four generations and doesn't speak much Spanish," he said.
Even one of the nation's largest Spanish-language broadcasters is embracing the trend. Univision's CEO Randy Falco, last summer, suggested that Univision would consider introducing English-language segments in the near future.
Transitioning with Concerns
Even those who embrace moving away from strictly monolingual content express some concern for the substance of Spanish-language media over the long term.
Stanley, former editor of El Sol, said many bilingual newspapers "translate content intended for the first generation into English, expecting that the second generation reads it," but the problem is "those stories don't resonate with them."
"Even though they (2nd generation, onward) keep the interest about their culture or the language, they won't care about the issue," he said, noting that Spanish-language media could lose readers if they employed this method.
Source: New America Media, Bilingual Future for California's Spanish Language Media?, by Suzanne Manneh, January 17, 2012.