Nieman Foundation at Harvard
For years and with various levels of success, U.S. news outlets have tried to engage Latinos and Spanish-language audiences with new bureaus abroad, Latino-focused verticals, new products, bilingual storytelling and/or translations. In May, Spain’s El País took a different approach: it launched its own digital edition to cover the United States in Spanish instead of trying to cover a targeted demographic. It’s casting a purposely wide net to reach Latin American and Spanish immigrants, U.S.-born Spanish speakers, non-heritage language learners (like me!), and any other news consumer who wants to get their U.S. news in Spanish.
There are at least 42 million Spanish speakers in the United States. On the heels of the U.S. presidential election, when 36.2 million Latinos are eligible to vote, the audience for Spanish-language news is a mixed bag. Just 24% of all U.S Latino adults prefer to get their news in Spanish compared to 51% in English, according to the Pew Research Center. That number jumps to 47% for Latino immigrants and drops to 3% for U.S. born Latinos. Half (50%) get their news from Hispanic news outlets at least sometimes.
“There isn’t a single ‘Latino’ reader just like there is no single ‘Latino’ vote, nor is there a single way to approach these readers,” said Jan Martínez Ahrens, director of El País América. “We can’t be so presumptuous as to believe that we are going to interest everyone. We will interest some. We’re going to get to know these readers and they’re going to get to know us, too.”
The U.S. edition operates much like the others with breaking news and enterprise stories about politics, the economy, business, sports, arts and culture, entertainment, immigration, and more. Recent stories include an analysis of a study’s findings that the United States needs seven million immigrants to be able to retire the country’s baby boomers, gun sales skyrocketing among Latinos in the U.S., a Supreme Court ruling against a Salvadoran man who was apparently denied entry into the country because of his tattoos, and the New York City Mermaid Parade.
El País started as a daily Spanish newspaper in Spain in 1976. It has been methodically expanding from “Spanish news outlet” to “news outlet in Spanish” since it launched El País América in March 2013 to cover Latin America. Its first digital country edition launched in Mexico in 2020, with later editions rolled out in Colombia and Argentina (2022), Chile (2023), along with an English-language homepage with translated stories. Today, each edition is curated with El País stories that are most relevant to readers of each country. It’s always covered the United States in relation to Latin America and Spain, but will now cover the U.S. for an audience here.
“The best reader is the one who reads you a lot,” Martínez said. “In this world of clickbait, that’s been forgotten. We have to try to make the readers who read us, read us more and more. It’s not about reaching infinite figures [of metrics], but rather, increasing our reach. You always have to have new readers who come in and refresh your ecosystem of readers.”
El País already has an established base of 11 bilingual correspondents and editors across the United States reporting and writing about the country. U.S. editor-in-chief Inés Santaeulalia is based in New York. Martínez, who has previously worked as an El País correspondent in the U.S. and is now based in Mexico, said he and his team are conscious of not parachuting into communities and the dangers of reporting as outsiders.
“We’re conscious of the fact that not everyone is going to subscribe at once.” Martínez said. “Subscription takes a lot of time and you have to generate a loyalty and [build] a mutual understanding of what your reader likes and what you can offer. The reader has to know you and know what you offer them is what they’re interested in. You never achieve that overnight.”
