Let's 'Rumbo'! Right Now!
New Spanish dailies battle for a young Latino audience looking for news
BY BELINDA ACOSTA

Antonio Ruiz Camacho, Rumbo
Those who watch newspaper publishing call Meximerica Media's Rumbo a big gamble. Not that Antonio Ruiz Camacho has noticed – the managing editor of the new Rumbo de Austin is too busy assembling a newspaper five days a week to worry about naysayers. And it's not as though plenty of other print media haven't launched and failed before. What has drawn observers (and skeptics) to watch Rumbo is its intended readership: first- and second-generation native Spanish speakers, ages 21-54, in communities where Hispanic immigration is large and growing.

There are also more generic media uncertainties. Overall newspaper readership is down, and prognosticators are sounding the death knell for newspapers and other print publications. So how is it that not one, but as it turns out, two Spanish language newspapers launched in Austin last year? The answer is not so mysterious, according to Omar Gallaga, editor of ¡ahora sí! ("right now!") the new Spanish-language weekly launched by the Austin American-Statesman on Aug. 19. The paper also hopes to reach the Spanish-speaking audience aged 21-54. "The market research was there to support the need," Gallaga says, "and our advertisers requested it."

While Ruiz Camacho also promises a commitment to the unique needs of Spanish-speaking and immigrant communities, he does see some differences between Rumbo de Austin and ¡ahora sí! "We are very different animals. We are also very service-focused. We report on important community issues, but always keep in mind the information that impacts our readers' lives. But we also believe the Spanish-speaking population deserves a paper as good as the English language papers. We want to be as good as The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal or the Austin American-Statesman, but we also want to be an Austin newspaper. We are not a ghetto newspaper. We try to outreach to all of Austin's Hispanic communities, not just on the Eastside, but throughout greater Austin."

Although Rumbo and ¡ahora sí! arrive with a great deal of corporate fanfare, Spanish language or bilingual newspapers are not new to Austin. La Prensa, "Austin's oldest bilingual newspaper," founded in 1986, is about 30/70 English and Spanish. Arriba launched around the same time and shared the same goal – promising to cover stories and subjects from the local Mexican-American and Chicano communities that mainstream newspapers like the Statesman and the Chronicle had neglected. Launched in 1990, El Mundo is published weekly entirely in Spanish, as is El Norte. Unlike their splashy new neighbors, all are small, locally owned businesses. Because of that context, Catherine Vasquez Revilla, publisher of La Prensa, is frankly skeptical of the prospects of Rumbo and ¡ahora sí!

"They're great-looking papers, but who can read them?" asks Vasquez Revilla. "The thing that upsets me is that small, locally owned papers like La Prensa, Arriba, and El Mundo – which has done the best job of reaching that limited market that needs to know when the color of the green card changes – now has to compete with these newspapers with plenty of money muscle behind them." (Pearson PLC is currently the principal stakeholder of Meximerica Media; Cox Newspapers owns the Statesman among many other media enterprises).