Miami Herald Now Quadrilingual p. 18

By: M.L. Stein Prints in Spanish, Creole and Portuguese in addition to English sp.

BILINGUAL NEWSPAPERS are nothing new but how about quadrilingual?
That's what the Miami Herald is these days, printing in three languages besides English: Spanish, Creole and Portuguese.
Its Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald, begun in 1987, now has a staff of 78 and includes everything from Hispanic soap opera information to an immigration hotline.
It has separate opinion pages and a tabloid, Vida Social. The Holland Museum in the Netherlands named El Nuevo Herald one of the 20 most interesting newspaper designs in the world for four consecutive years.
To serve the estimated 200,000 Haitians living in Dade and Broward counties, Fla., the Herald in February started printing a page of news capsules in Creole as a Sunday feature in two
of the paper's seven Dade County "Neighbors" tabloid sections. The sections reach a reported 39% of the Herald's home-delivery customers in Dade County alone.
In January, the Herald began publishing a page of Brazilian news in Portuguese with the help of Agencia Estatado, a news service in Brazil.
A Herald spokesman said more than 300,000 Brazilians visit Miami every year and a "growing number of them are settling permanently. You can hear Portuguese spoken in downtown Miami almost as frequently as Spanish."
Last year, the Herald, a Knight-Ridder newspaper, also launched Florida Marketplace, a monthly news and advertising section in Spanish and Portuguese. It is printed and distributed in Latin America by partner newspapers in Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. The Herald produces the pages and sends the negatives to the foreign papers.
Herald publisher David Lawrence Jr. said the advertorial opens the Miami market to 580,000 new readers.
Referring to the Herald's four-language publication, Lawrence said, "Our mission is straightforward ? to communicate with readers in a way that is effective for them."
The Herald began its multilingual operation in 1976 with the launching of El Miami Herald. At the time, Dade County's Latino population ? mostly Cuban ? was approaching 500,000, almost a third of its residents.
El Miami Herald, which gave way to El Nuevo Herald, was a 24-page section consisting of stories translated from the main Herald. By 1985, the Hispanic population jumped to more than 850,000, representing 43% of Dade County's 1.8 million people.
Today, the paper said, El Nuevo Herald has a daily circulation of 103,000 and 127,000 Sundays, reaching 250,000 readers every day. Advertising, the spokesman added, has increased 250% since the days of El Miami Herald six and a half years ago.
According to the 1990 census, 562,000 Cubans live in Dade County; Cubans are 59% of all Hispanics. The census also showed 74,000 Nica-raguans, 68,000 Puerto Ricans, 54,000 Colombians and large numbers of Mexicans, Dominicans, Hondurans and Peruvians in the county.
Lawrence said the Herald has good relationships with Hispanics, including the Cuban community. A segment of the Cuban population for several years had sniped at the paper for allegedly being in favor of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba, a charge that repeatedly was denied.
"We have made lots of progress in the community with different kinds of people," Lawrence said. "The Herald has a great deal of respect for different points of view. Relationships are on a much more even keel."
He added that El Nuevo Herald is profitable and growing in circulation.
?"We have made lots of progress in the community with different kinds of people. The Herald has a great deal of respoct for different point of view. Relationships are on a much more even keel." ) [Caption]
?( David Lawrence Jr., publisher, Miami Herald) [Photo]