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El País, arguably the most prestigious Spanish-language news organization of the past half century, and whose slogan is “The Global Newspaper,” has just made one of the more seemingly obvious moves in its history: it opened a national newsroom in one of the largest Spanish-speaking countries in the world—the United States. As logical as this might sound, this new market was out of its reach for a long time, not least because El País had to wait for it to actually develop.
El País U.S., a Spanish-language digital news site, launched in May with a newsroom of fifteen journalists based across the country, and is seeking full-time reporters and freelancers in New York, Florida, Texas, and California. The managing editor, Inés Santaeulalia, said that the timing was meant to capitalize on the crucial role of the thirty-six million Latinos who are eligible to vote this November. “The electoral year is key to us,” she said. “We decided to launch before the summer to position ourselves ahead of the elections. It will be a moment of great political attention from the Latino population and the entire country, due to the strength of their vote.” Indeed, the site’s first issue was dedicated to this subject; it explored the reasons behind the disillusionment of so many Latinos with Joe Biden, who “did not fulfill” promises important to them, and their growing support for Donald Trump, despite his pledge of record mass deportations. But El País U.S. is also covering Latino angles on the topics that are of most importance to all Americans, such as guns, with a focus on the disproportionate impact of gun violence on Latino communities, and the campaign of Kamala Harris, focussing on how the story of her immigrant parents resonates among Latinos.
El País is owned by PRISA Media, a transnational conglomerate with major interests in Spain and the Americas, whose holdings include a textbook publisher, a network of Spanish-language radio stations across Latin America, and other newspapers. In what might be an overly optimistic appraisal, at a shareholder meeting in June, Carlos Núñez, PRISA’s executive chairman, estimated a potential audience of sixty million people for El País U.S. That’s about the size of the entire Latino population, many of whom are not Spanish speakers. (El País has offered English translations of selected digital stories for years, aiming to capture an international audience, but its focus remains on Spanish content.) Yet, according to the 2020 census, there are forty-two million native Spanish speakers in the U.S. (up from twenty-eight million just two decades ago), which makes it the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. (Spain itself is fourth, according to the Instituto Cervantes.)
Spanish has long been the second most spoken language in the U.S. (one of only a handful of countries without an official language). And it is spoken by “a distinct language group that continues to replenish itself” owing to “persistent migration, which is the factor that sets Spanish apart from every other non-English language in the United States,” as Rosina Lozano, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote in “An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States.” Though fifty-four per cent of Latino adults get their news mostly in English, according to Pew Research, there are still millions who prefer to consume the news in Spanish (twenty-four per cent of the total Latino population) or consume it in both English and Spanish (twenty-three per cent). El País U.S. is betting on those readers.
Spanish-language media has a long and rich history in the U.S.; it has played a fundamental role as an advocate for immigrants’ rights and often served as the only source of information for entire communities. In 2019, the last time the sector was mapped, in a project I led at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, at CUNY, there were more than six hundred Latino news outlets in the country. These included the giant national TV networks Univision and Telemundo, dozens of radio stations, more than two hundred and forty print newspapers (most of them local), thirty-two magazines, and eighty-seven digital-only publications. Like the news industry at large, most of these newsrooms were dealing with declining audiences, and were still struggling to adapt to the digital age, with varying levels of success. The major national newspaper chain, ImpreMedia, the owner of the once great metro papers El Diario (New York) and La Opinión (Los Angeles), was consolidating content and laying off reporters. (The company has since been acquired by a private-equity-backed startup.) Despite its size and importance, the Spanish-language media sector has long been seen as foreign by the Anglo mainstream media, and no media critics in major news organizations cover Spanish-language media as a regular part of their beat.
In 2022, amid serious concerns about right-wing misinformation campaigns targeting Spanish speakers, a group led by two progressive Latina entrepreneurs entered the field, acquiring seventeen radio stations in cities with large Latino populations. And last November, Univision’s softball interview with Donald Trump (and its decision to not give the interview to its star anchor, Jorge Ramos), following the network’s merger with the Mexican conglomerate Televisa, raised alarms among progressives that Univision was becoming less critical of the former President. Poll after poll was showing that the Republican Party was energizing Latino voters while the Democratic Party was losing its traditional hold over them. This is the context in which El País decided to launch its U.S. edition.
To reach this point, El País had to first undergo its own transformation. Founded in Madrid as a daily newspaper in May, 1976, five months after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, it soon became a prominent voice of la transición, Spain’s transition from a four-decade-long dictatorship to a modern European democracy. El País didn’t just report on the process but took an active role in it: when a military group attempted a coup d’état, seizing parliament in February, 1981, El País was the only newspaper to come out in support of democracy and a new constitution while events were still unfolding. Around that time, several Latin American countries were also emerging from dictatorships. Spain looked like a successful role model, and El País a place to discuss the way forward. My first job as a reporter was in a scrappy, pro-democracy newsroom in Buenos Aires in the early nineteen-nineties, about a decade after the end of the Argentinean dictatorship. I bought El País at the downtown newsstands that carried it, and spent hours sitting in coffee shops reading columns by such major Latin American intellectuals as Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and by Spanish writers including Rosa Montero, Manuel Vicent, Fernando Savater, Javier Marías, and Almudena Grandes.
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