Reflejos, Chicago

By: Mark Fitzgerald Not so long ago, Reflejos was a little-known, free-distribution bilingual monthly growing slowly and undisturbed in the suburbs of Chicago, far from the battle in the barrios between the Spanish-language weeklies La Raza and Exito, Tribune Co.'s forerunner to its daily Hoy.

Now the Newspaper Association of America and metros from as far away as Bakersfield, Calif., are studying the "Reflejos model." Why? Because mainstream newspapers that have barely figured out how to reach Hispanics in teeming city neighborhoods are discovering that increasing numbers of Latinos are diffused in the sprawling 'burbs. Reflejos is virtually the only paper with any real experience in reaching these suburbanites who simultaneously embrace the cultural values of their Latino city cousins and their Middle-America neighbors.

Reflejos was essentially invisible until Jerry Campagna and his wife bought the struggling monthly in 1996 and grew it from 8,000 copies to 18,000. In 2000 it was bought by Chicago's Daily Herald, which itself had taken the suburban route in growing from a small weekly into Illinois' third-largest daily. Reflejos immediately became a weekly, and distribution was cranked up to 58,000.

Last year famed designer Mario Garcia was brought in for a top-to-bottom redesign that introduced rich colors and ingenious elements to navigate editorial content that was changed to predominately Spanish, with short English summaries. Features for second-generation Latinos are fully bilingual, as is a 17,000-copy edition that goes to libraries and schools for English or Spanish classes.

Distribution has now doubled to 100,000 ? including costly U.S. Postal Service delivery to 30,000 Hispanic households. Reflejos operates like a separate business out of a corner of the Daily Herald's building, where Campagna leads the "Reflejos Mambo Band," a bilingual editorial and business staff that produces a thick tab with ad pages increasingly filled by big national accounts like General Motors and SBC. On the drawing board is a plan for a third Reflejos edition that flips the language formula in favor of English dominance, to target the 28% of suburban Hispanic households with incomes over $75,000.

Reflejos' unashamedly uplifting editorial content moves with a certain street smarts among the Latino and Midwest suburban cultures. Even the "ReflejoGrama" crossword puzzle reflects those dual loyalties: The questions are in Spanish, the answers in English. -- Mark Fitzgerald