By: Mark Fitzgerald Circulation Manager Jimmy Vega hears it all the time, and so he had to set the record straight when I called Friday.
"It's really not true that we use only taxi drivers to distribute the paper, I don't know how that rumor got started," he said. "It would be nice if they all were, I guess, but out of our total team of drivers now, we have four who are taxi drivers."
On the other hand, at one time taxi drivers in the Atlanta area made up more than half of the circulation drivers for the 58,000 free-distribution Spanish-language weekly Mundo Hispanico. Even now, many of the drivers have the same routine: They fill their cars up with bundles of the tabloid early Thursday morning, dropping them off at distribution points -- and picking up passengers as the back seat clears off.
It's a charming tradition that recalls the way another scrappy ethnic weekly, the black-oriented Chicago Defender, extended its circulation in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. Black railroad workers would drop the papers at stops throughout Dixie -- or simply toss them to depots as the train whistled by. (The Defender switched to daily publication in the 1950s.)
In fact, Mundo Hispanico has the same kind of wide-ranging circulation ambitions to serve a Latino population that is exploding in Atlanta. Its drivers serve not only the sprawling, 20-county Atlanta metro area, but they also distribute papers throughout north Georgia to cities including Macon, Rome, and Athens. All told, the paper has 2,700 distribution points. The weekly was recently bought by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, but it continues to be run by Lino H. Dominguez, who founded it in 1979.
Taxi drivers give the paper a certain distribution advantage, Circulation Manager Vega says. "They know the city good, and they hear things," he said. "They're out on the street all the time, so they can see how the [pickup rate] is going, or if there are any problems. They also talk with people about the paper, and sometimes they bring us complaints, like they don't like this color in the design or they didn't like this particular article."
One disadvantage is that cab drivers by their nature want to keep hustling on to the next stop, and they may not spend enough time building a relationship with owners of the stores, restaurants, and other drop spots.
"One of problems with the market is that it's getting very crowded," Vega said. "We have six or seven other [Spanish-language] papers that are not quite in our league now, but they make things interesting." Not surprisingly, the upstart papers, most of which come out on Fridays, often find the Mundo Hispanico racks, which are filled on Thursdays, a tempting roost.
"They'll throw us out, or make a mess and the owner gets mad," Vega said. "It's a soap opera every week."
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