New Focus for Publishers Is the Hispanic Reader

NEW YORK (By Jacques Steinberg, NYTimes) October 15, 2004 - Newspaper publishers, seeking to tap fresh pools of readers, are increasingly devising offerings that they hope will be of particular interest to Hispanic Americans.

In October, for example, The New York Post, which is owned by the News Corporation, began publishing a monthly supplement called NYP Tempo, a lifestyle-oriented section that is written in English and aimed at Hispanic New Yorkers in their teens, 20's and 30's. Earlier this year, The Home News Tribune, a Gannett newspaper in East Brunswick, N.J., started Nuestra Comunidad, a weekly written in Spanish that has news and features.

And in August, the Tribune Company's Publishing unit announced that it was seeking to expand Hoy - a Spanish daily in New York that has an average weekday readership of more than 90,000 - to Chicago, where it will replace a 10-year-old Spanish language weekly called Exito. Tribune has formed a Hispanic media division to look for other opportunities.

In large part, the publishers are reacting to data from the United States Census Bureau. Census statisticians predict, for example, that the percentage of the American population that is of Hispanic origin will be 18 percent in 2025, double what it was in 1990.

"We could see a growing readership, but we didn't have a section that catered specifically to Hispanics,'' said Lachlan Murdoch, the publisher of The Post, who added that NYP Tempo might eventually expand to a weekly. "And simply from a business point of view, we could see there was a pent-up demand of advertisers who needed a vehicle to attract young Hispanic readers.''

While many newspapers have published their offerings in Spanish, Mr. Murdoch is taking a different approach - one that other publishers may follow.

"It had to be in English,'' he said of NYP Tempo. "It's for second- and third-generation Hispanics.''