NAHP President: Paid Circ Not Working For Latino Papers

By: Mark Fitzgerald Hern?n Guaracao, president of the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP), has some free advice for his fellow Spanish-language newspaper publishers: Give away your papers.

Answering a question at a press conference Tuesday afternoon to promote NAHP's upcoming 2004 Miami Ad Summit, Guaracao said the slow growth of paid-circulation Spanish-language newspapers reflects the all-American trend towards free distribution.

"It's a quandary for all of us, be it a newspaper in English or in Spanish," he said. "This is the culture of America. People love to read (a newspaper) but won't pay a quarter or 50 cents. So my basic advice is to change to free (distribution). ... The facts are the facts -- circulation in the future will be free."

Guaracao is publisher of the weekly Al Dia, which, according to the E&P International Year Book, has a free distribution of 50,000 and a paid circulation of 1,000.

Latino papers will be forced to move to free distribution because paid papers have yet to show they can post household penetration numbers that compete with broadcast or outdoor advertising, Guaracao said.

On the other hand, said Carlos Olea, associate publisher of the Chicago weekly La Raza, the free-distribution model is a natural for Spanish-language papers because of the tendency of the Latino demographic to cluster in dense barrios that make door-to-door distribution efficient. La Raza distributes about 175,000 copies to households and sells another 20,000 in stores and through racks.

For many years, La Raza was primarily a paid paper. "It's very difficult now to entice the community and teach them" to pay for a newspaper, Olea said.

Advertisers, though, still need to be convinced on the free-distribution model, Olea said. "The general-market media advertisers basically buy paid circulation," he noted, "but when that perspective is applied to Hispanic media, the whole thing changes because most of us are not in ABC (the Audit Bureau of Circulations)."

The NAHP meeting, to be held Oct. 12-13 at the Omni Colonnade in the Coral Gables section of Miami, has the theme, "The Hispanic Print Boom." With its kickoff on Columbus Day, organizers are calling the meeting "el discubrimiento" of Hispanic print by corporate America. Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards are expected Oct. 12, organizers say.

Among the other speakers: Edward Schumacher Matos, CEO and founder of Meximerica Media, Inc., publisher of three dailies in Texas; Charles Patrick Garcia, founder and CEO of The Sterling Financial Group, a Hispanic-owned and operated investment-banking firm in South Florida; Gary Meo, senior vice president of print and Internet sales at Scarborough Research; Robert Armband, president and CEO of Prensamerica, owner of La Raza; Craig Dessens, President of Strategic Print Marketing (SPM); Manuel Toro, publisher of La Prensa in Orlando; John Murray, vice president of circulation marketing at the Newspaper Association of America (NAA); and Michael Lavery, president of ABC (the Audit Bureau of Circulations).

Further information about the meeting is available on the NAHP Web site.