Majority Of Hispanic Print Media Posting News Online.

According to a national survey of 100 top-tier U.S. Hispanic dailies, weeklies and semi-weeklies conducted by LatinClips and Hispanic PR Wire, 75% of Hispanic print media outlets say they post their news content online.

A separate LatinClips audit of print media experts, researchers and editors in Latin America indicates that approximately 93% of the region’s Top 150 publications are fully online.

The U.S. Hispanic media survey shows that of the outlets that currently post their content online, 97% said that the amount of news that they post has increased in the past year. Within the next year, respondents said they believed the percentage of print media posting news online will go up to as much as 90%. Overall the survey also shows that 43% of U.S. Hispanic print news websites are bilingual, 48% are in Spanish only and 9% are in English.

“With the Hispanic Internet now maturing, many Hispanic publications see the opportunity that the Internet represents both in terms of increasing their readership as well as for obtaining prospective advertisers,” said Zeke Montes, president of the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP). “The good news is that professional Internet publishing, once expensive and hard, is now very economical and easy. In some cities, Hispanic publications are now using their online presence to differentiate themselves from competing
publications.”

Including Hispanic Internet portals and Webzines, which were not part of the survey, there are an estimated more than 350 U.S. Hispanic news sites regularly posting news, according to LatinClips.

LATIN AMERICA NEWS ON THE INTERNET

The presence of major Latin American print media on the Internet is even stronger. An estimated 93% of all the Top 150 dailies and weeklies in the region are online, according to an audit of Latin American media experts and researchers conducted by LatinClips.

“Almost 100% of top Latin American publications are online and if they’re not it is unusual”, states Horacio Ruiz, publisher/editor-in-chief of the Inter American Press Association’s (IAPA) prestigious media trade journal Hora de Cierre. Marti Estell, Program Officer for the Western Hemisphere at the Washington Foreign Press Center at the Department of State says, “it is very rare to find a major news medium without presence on the web.”

Overall Latin American print and online content are almost a mirror of each other, but a point of great interest gleaned by the LatinClips study is the importance that online news has for expatriates. Jose Estrada Torres, a researcher from Grupo Reforma of Monterrey, Mexico affirms, that “the online version is very important for expatriates; the number of visits to our websites is enormous.” To which Ruiz adds:
“(Latin American) editors are counting on expatriate readership and consider it to be integral. For this reason they make the decision to make both print and online content very similar.”

LatinClips’ U.S. Hispanic survey and Latin American media audit underscore one key point says Christine Clavijo-Kish, CEO of LatinClips. “Marketers and communicators who want to effectively monitor what Latin print media are saying about their organizations, their competitors or issues can now effectively do so via the Internet. It’s comparable to monitoring hard copy versions.”