'Hoy' Downsizes Content Along with Circ

By: Mark Fitzgerald With Hoy's circulation revealed as just half of what
it claimed to both advertisers and the Audit Bureau of
Circulations (ABC), Tribune Co. this week began
publishing a shrunken version of the once high-flying
Spanish-language daily.

World and national news that once spread across
several pages now occupies just two. A full-page,
full-color weather map of the entire hemisphere is now
a graphic of the Chicago metropolitan area that shares
space with the crossword puzzle, horoscope and a
single comic. Two comic strips were eliminated; Garfield made the cut. The daily two-page editorial and Op-ed package is now a single page.

Hoy did double its daily entertainment section to two
pages, and increased the story count in its weekly
feature sections.

In launching the new version of Hoy, Tribune said the
changes came as a result of reader focus groups held
in August in the three markets where it publishes: New
York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

But in an interview Tuesday, Hoy Publisher Digby
Solomon Diez said there were obvious business reasons for the changes -- not all of them related to the
fallout of the circulation fraud.

"Obviously, I've been busy reviewing all of Hoy's
business plans," said Solomon, who replaced Louis Sito when the founding publisher and editor resigned this summer because of the circulation scandal. "There's no doubt that part of it is that we've got to get a
little closer to the rest of the industry in the ad/edit ratio. Hoy has grown so much -- and has added a lot of special sections pushed by the advertising department that they couldn't sell -- that I thought we were shoveling out straw to fill a bigger basket. But our editorial staff wasn't getting any bigger so quality was suffering."

The big newshole for national and international
stories was filled with wire copy that, Solomon says,
was "not particularly compelling." Focus groups, he
said, "hated the Op-ed pages." Readers said they
wanted entertainment and sports stories that were easy to read, he said: "They don't want a bible with long,
huge articles."

Pages were cut back to force editors to present only their best stuff, Solomon said, and even with the reduction, the editorial ad ratio still hasn't achieved a 40/60 split. "It's closer to 50/50 -- which most editors would kill to have," Solomon said.

Juan Arango, Hoy's senior vice president and executive
editor, said in a statement that readers told the
paper they wanted more entertainment news and "how-to" features "to help orient themselves to their new country."

The changes come as Hoy tries to recover from
revelations that its ferocious circulation growth --
becoming the nation's second-largest Spanish-language daily in less than six years -- was based on extensive fraud. In August, Tribune said that Hoy's circulation, reported to ABC last spring as 92,000,
would prove to be somewhere in the range of 45,000 to
55,000 copies.

In a Sept. 10 letter to advertisers in the New York
edition, where the fraud took place, Solomon and
operations chief Tim Kennedy offered apologies and
explanations for the circulation, and said advertising
reps would soon be contacting them to work out a
settlement.

Solomon declined to comment on the arrangements. "That's nobody's business but ours," he said.

Tribune spokesperson Christine Hennessey said any
compensation or other agreement would be worked out on an individual basis with an advertiser. Hoy, she said,
is "looking at each advertiser's spending with the New
York edition and providing them with a resolution
That's fair and appropriate, and one that we hope will
keep them advertising in Hoy."