Spanish-language newspapers beef up quantity and quality

By Timothy Pratt

Tuesday, April 3, 2007 | 7:12 a.m.

El Mundo, the Las Vegas Valley's oldest Spanish-language newspaper, has hired more professional journalists in the past year-plus than during any comparable period in its 27-year history - three.

Meanwhile, across the valley, El Tiempo, the Spanish-language upstart at 12 years old, has just gone from an 80-page tabloid to a four-section, 88-page broadsheet, meaning, among other things, that its heft will contain more stories.

Que pasa aqui? you might ask. It's a Darwinian dance between the two weeklies, as the valley's growing Hispanic community - now estimated at 450,000 - slowly raises its expectations, seeking real, big-city newspapers, even if they are both gratis.

Federico Subervi, professor at Texas State University and director of the Latinos and Media project, said recent developments in the valley's Spanish-language press have been seen elsewhere. As Hispanic communities grow in towns and cities across the nation, the newspapers, reflecting their communities' maturation, generally improve, he said.

The beginnings of most Spanish-language newspapers in the United States could be described as vente tu, a term that means "come one, come all," Subervi said.

Papers with corporate ownership and ones in large cities such as New York, Miami and Los Angeles have tended to evolve faster, while what he called mom and pop operations have been slower to raise their standards, he said.

In Las Vegas, El Tiempo, a publication of the Review-Journal, is an example of the former; El Mundo is privately owned.

But both are going through changes of late, a consequence of the unrelenting growth of the Hispanic community in the valley, now an estimated 26 percent of the total population. Those changes range from hiring more professional journalists to including pages that teach readers basic English.

"The Spanish-language media (in Las Vegas) is having to see itself as more professional - and those that aren't trained or don't have experience will have to get out of the way," said Valdemar Gonzalez, recently named El Mundo's editor.

Gonzalez, who has been with El Mundo for a decade, said he welcomes his paper's changes, which go beyond recently hiring two fellow Mexicans and a Colombian who studied and worked in journalism before joining the staff.

They also include such subtle but vital signs of big-league behavior as giving credit where credit is due, said Eddie Escobedo, the paper's owner and founder.

Formerly, the weekly would use a story from a news service such as the Associated Press, or photos from other publications, and not tell the reader who was responsible for the information. The paper even cribbed stories from a local English-language daily, translating them into Spanish without attribution.

No more.

Escobedo has presided over a long arc of changes during the past quarter-century that has not been exclusive to Las Vegas.

The former barman saw in 1980 that his fellow Hispanics needed a source of information - and a place to advertise - when there weren't many professionals migrating from Latin America to the United States .

In 1982, two years after getting El Mundo off the ground, he and six other papers formed the National Association of Hispanic Publications.

All had one thing in common, he said.

"We started the papers because of a necessity, not because we knew anything about journalism," he said.

Now the association has 169 members, with 28 more being considered for membership at the group's annual meeting April 11. All of them began by the bootstraps, Escobedo said.

Hernando Amaya, associate editor at El Tiempo, recently spoke with vigor about his paper's second week as a broadsheet.

"The larger format is traditionally recognized as more serious ... while tabloids are seen as more light, " he said.

The word mas fell off his tongue at least a half-dozen times in describing the new version of his paper: more pages, more local news, more cartoons, more entertainment news. The larger format also allows for new sections such as a page for children and another with lessons in English.

Amaya, who was a radio journalist for the army in his native Colombia, said he has heard more in recent years from a small but vocal community of educated professionals in the valley's Hispanic population, many from countries other than Mexico, still the dominant group among Spanish-speakers.

"It's a group of people that's more prepared, from other Latin countries. They're seeking something more," he said.

Staff at both papers said they also always keep in mind that most of their readers have a grade-school education.

"Still, we want to push things a bit," Amaya said.

Subervi thinks that increasing professionalism in Spanish-language media will make for better citizens, in the broadest sense of the word.

"It's a good thing ... that will improve civic participation," he said. "With quality news that's well-written, you educate them as well."