Another Heavyweight to Launch Spanish-Language Dailies

By: Mark Fitzgerald Let's get rea-a-a-a-a-a-a-dy to Rumbo!

A new venture owned by a unit of the global media company Pearson PLC is coming soon to four Texas cities with a Spanish-language daily to be called Rumbo.

Rumbo's creator is Meximerica, which this month got capital of $16.5 million as the first tranche of an investment from its new owner, Recoletos Grupo de Comunicacion S.A. A publisher of business dailies throughout South America, Recoletos is probably best known for its highly successful Spanish sports daily Marca. Its principal stockholder is Pearson, publisher of London's Financial Times.

The new paper borrows many of its elements -- a tabloid with modular design and plenty of common content -- from the model Tribune Co. pioneered with Hoy, the Spanish-language daily that's publishing in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles with aspirations of entering the nation's top-10 Hispanic markets.

As they expand, Rumbo and Hoy sooner or later will bump up against each other. For now, Rumbo is starting out with papers in Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and the Lower Rio Grande Valley border towns of Brownsville, McAllen and Harlingen. It will face competition in Houston, where the Houston Chronicle since 1979 has published the free-distribution weekly La Voz de Houston. Coincidently, the same day Meximerica announced Rumbo, the Chronicle announced a partnership with La Opini?n, the Los Angeles Spanish-language daily. Every Friday, the Chronicle will carry 100,000 copies of La Opini?n's weekly entertainment magazine La Vibra ("The Vibe") for distribution to subscribers and non-subscribers in the Houston market's heavily Hispanic ZIP Codes.

Both Rumbo's business and editorial model will differ from Hoy, said Edward Schumacher Matos, CEO and editorial director of the new venture, Meximerica Media.

For one thing, where Hoy targets all the nation's major Spanish-speaking ethnic groups, Rumbo will concentrate only on the Mexican market. "Right now our economies of scale are based on going after the same market everywhere," Schumacher said by phone. "It's not just Hispanics. It's primarily a Mexican market. We have the luck of having a very large Mexican audience, with a secondary audience of Central Americans and Colombians, so that we can really focus on content more to serve what's essentially the same market in every community."

It's doubtful, Schumacher adds, that Rumbo will publish on the East Coast. "It's different dealing with New York, where you have such a polyglot community from so many different backgrounds," he said.

Rumbo also plans to have even more common content than Hoy, with about a third, and perhaps as much as 40% of its editorial space devoted to local news as determined by local managing editors. It will have a locally oriented front page. The common content of sports, entertainment and, especially, service-oriented journalism will have a magazine feel to it, Schumacher said.

Meximerica called on some big industry names for its launch. The concept was researched by Christine Urban's Urban Associates and the tabloid is being designed by Danilo Black's Roger Black, who designed E&P's print magazine. Jonathan Thompson, former CEO of the newspaper advertising and consulting firm Sawyer Ferguson Walker, is chief operating officer of Meximerica and head of advertising.

"We're going to put a lot of emphasis on design and graphics and on color," Schumacher said. "It's going to be more like the new tabloids that are starting up in South America or Europe. We think it's going to be unlike anything that's out there [in the United States]."

While the target audience of ages 18 to 45 is as young as the demographics of Mexicans in America, Rumbo will not be a youth paper. "The people in the audience are, for the most part, parents," he said. "We're after men and women, and let me emphasize women. We found woman want something like this, a daily that will help them with aspirational things: To better their families and to make it here in this country."

The very name attempts to capture that, according to the publishing company. Rumbo, it says, is "the Spanish word often associated with the Latin American phrase meaning 'heading north for a better life.' "

Schumacher, a former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Americas, said Rumbo will be "the kind of newspaper American chains say they want to publish, but are unable to publish."

"We'll be able to have a lot of common core content," he said. "You saw that revolt in (Tribune's) Baltimore (Sun) because they were upset about orders coming from Chicago? One of the beauties of starting from scratch is you don't have all those ingrained habits and fiefdoms."