Bogota's 'El Tiempo' Launches 'Happy' Paper

By: Mark Fitzgerald The "America's Extra" column appears once a month in E&P.

Just four days after Colombia's largest newspaper, the respected broadsheet El Tiempo, launched its downmarket tabloid Hoy, all the news media were reporting the latest outrage in the nation's bloody and drug-fueled civil war. Leftist guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had kidnapped a former governor while he was riding in a United Nations vehicle with U.N. officials on their way to a peace ceremony.

So what was on the front page of Hoy?

"A pig race. There was a country festival over the weekend, and we had a nice color picture of a pig race," Hoy's director, Jose Clopatofsky, said merrily in a phone interview from Bogota. "Hoy is quite different from El Tiempo: There are never pictures of political people. No guerrilla war. It's a positive newspaper, with good news, fun news. Happy news."

In a fortunate bit of timing for its happy-news content, Hoy was launched three weeks ago just as Colombians began watching in giddy amazement as their underdog national soccer team advanced from victory to victory on its way to winning the Americas Cup. Soccer, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, health advice, and gossip -- Hoy sticks to an editorial formula of short articles on light topics.

It's also light on the pocketbook: At 500 pesos, or a little less than a quarter, Hoy sells for less than half the cost of any other daily paper in Bogota.

Hoy is already creating, well, happy problems for the Santos family-owned Casa Editorial El Tiempo. The tabloid is aimed at the estimated 4 million lower-middle-class bogotanos who do not read any paper at all. But Hoy, which is selling about 32,000 copies, is proving surprisingly popular among the upper classes, who are demanding that street hawkers come into their neighborhoods, too. Despite an ambitious rollout with 1,000 street vendors and 2,000 outlets, Hoy so far is circulating in only about half the city. "The target [market] is quite wider than we expected," Clopatofsky said.

Hoy is the latest of an increasing number of Latin American downmarket tabloids created by metro papers to reach readerships they are missing. Hoy took some of its inspiration from one of those pioneering efforts, the Brazilian tabloid Extra. While Hoy is the first new paper Casa Editorial El Tiempo has created in 90 years, it went from conception to in-house design to execution in a matter of a few months, Clopatofsky said.

The market for Hoy looks wide open. Surprisingly for a big Latin American city, Bogota has only one tiny sports daily, and the only other downmarket tab, El Espacio, is very downmarket: Clopatofsky dismisses it as "porno."

"There is no competition in this niche," Clopatofsky said. "Our goal is to be making money in a very short time -- six months -- with a minimum of investment ... and to be the second-largest circulation paper in Colombia within a year."