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 News from Around the Americas | January 2005 
A Texas Paper Bets on Español, Not Assimilation
 Simon Romero - NYTimes
 San Antonio, Texas - The headquarters of Rumbo, a new chain of Spanish-language newspapers, are in an old office building here, a short stroll away from the Alamo, where Mexican troops in 1836 sought to quell the secessionist ambitions of English-speaking colonists in Texas.
The secessionists, of course, ultimately succeeded in their goal, ensuring more than a century and a half of Anglo dominance in Texas. But now Rumbo is building momentum against that dominance, one reader at a time.
In one of the most closely watched experiments in the publishing industry, Rumbo has started four Spanish-language daily newspapers in Texas in the past year, starting in San Antonio before going to Houston, Austin and the Rio Grande Valley. Hispanics will become a majority in the state in 20 years or so, according to Steve Murdock, the Texas state demographer, and are already the largest ethnic group or majority in several of its largest cities.
Rumbo (pronounced ROOM-boh), which gets its name from a Spanish word that means "heading to" - as in "heading to the United States" or "heading to a better life" - is betting that the state's growing Hispanic population is ready for a sophisticated daily newspaper in Spanish that mixes coverage of local news and sports with commentary and dispatches from Latin America. The writers Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes are among Rumbo's regular contributors, their essays published in the same tabloid pages as reports on local soccer leagues.
The Hispanic market, of course, already supports fast-growing Spanish-language television and radio industries, but Rumbo's Texas venture is perhaps the biggest gamble yet that a large part of the Hispanic population will read a daily paper in Spanish. Spanish-speaking readers in most parts of the country have been the domain of small family-owned newspapers, in part because bigger concerns have considered the market undesirable.
So it is no surprise that Rumbo's plan has been met with skepticism and resistance from larger publishers.
"Rumbo is quite appealing visually and editorially, but I was dumbfounded that they started with a completely Spanish-language paper in San Antonio," said Lawrence Walker, publisher of the San Antonio Express-News, the city's dominant daily paper. "When we brought in our focus groups to study the Hispanic market, we thought it should be directed at their culture, not their language."
Rumbo received $16.5 million in financing from Recoletos, a Spanish media company based in Madrid and controlled by Pearson of Britain. Nearly every Spanish-language newspaper venture started as a unit of a foreign-owned company has failed in past years, according to Kirk Whisler, president of Latino Print Network in Carlsbad, Calif., an organization that follows the Hispanic publishing industry. "One reason for such a high failure rate is that when it's time for cost-cutting there's often nobody in the boardroom to defend the new paper in the U.S.," Mr. Whisler said.
Rumbo's combined circulation remains small, just under 100,000 a day, but the venture has already touched a nerve among the largest newspaper publishers in Texas. In each of the markets Rumbo entered in recent months, the dominant English-language newspaper has reacted with pre-emptive attacks, creating or buying newspapers to compete with Rumbo's tabloids.
In Austin, for instance, The Austin American-Statesman, owned by Cox Newspapers, introduced ¡ahora sí!, a free Spanish-language. In the Rio Grande Valley, Freedom Communications, which publishes The Brownsville Herald and The Monitor, in McAllen, created a daily newspaper in Spanish, La Frontera. The Houston Chronicle, owned by the Hearst Corporation, bought a small Spanish-language weekly called La Voz and created a free weekly entertainment paper in Spanish, La vibra, while in San Antonio, a city that is nearly 60 percent Hispanic, The San Antonio Express-News, also owned by Hearst, opted to create a bilingual weekly, Conexión.
Edward Schumacher Matos, a former editor at The Wall Street Journal who founded Rumbo last year with Jonathan Friedland, The Journal's former Los Angeles bureau chief, acknowledged that any new publishing venture was challenging. He says he does not expect Rumbo to become profitable until late 2007 or early 2008.
By then, however, Rumbo hopes to have extended its network of newspapers to cities outside Texas, bypassing markets like Los Angeles, New York, Dallas and Miami, where large companies like the Tribune Company, ImpreMedia, the Belo Corporation and Knight Ridder are already entrenched in efforts to sell daily newspapers in Spanish.
So for now, Rumbo's strategy hinges on the growing Hispanic population in Texas. Non-Hispanic whites were nudged into the minority in 2003 for the first time since early in the 19th century, falling to 49.5 percent from 52.6 percent in 2000, according to the United States Census Bureau. That shift took place as the Hispanic population increased to 35.3 percent of the state's 21.5 million people, up from 32.2 percent in the same period.
Much of the growth in the Hispanic population in Texas comes from first-generation immigrants, mostly from Mexico, though with growing communities - especially in Houston - of Colombians, Salvadorans and Venezuelans. Those recent arrivals are the readers Rumbo is hoping to lure. Nearly 40 percent of first-generation Hispanics get all their news from Spanish-language sources, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.
Competitors, though, are not convinced that the Hispanic market is robust enough to support new dailies in Spanish. Part of their skepticism might stem from concern about cannibalizing circulation from their own English-language papers.
"We're not sure the market is ready for a paid Spanish-language daily yet," said Jack Sweeney, the publisher of The Houston Chronicle. "The problem I have with a daily is that the more acculturated the Hispanic community becomes, the more likely it is to read in English."
Rumbo has already run into some unexpected turbulence with the potential loss of a high-profile British partner. Pearson, which also publishes The Financial Times, said last month that it was selling its controlling stake in Recoletos to the Spanish company's management in a buyout worth nearly $1 billion.
Mr. Schumacher Matos said that transaction, which has not been completed, had nothing to do with Recoletos's gamble on Rumbo. Marjorie Scardino, Pearson's chief executive and a Texan who grew up in Texarkana, traveled to San Antonio last fall for a meeting of Recoletos directors, where she and other members of the Spanish company's board voiced support for Rumbo, he said.
Rumbo, meanwhile, reflects Recoletos's expansion efforts in the Americas and Spain, where it publishes the country's leading sports and financial newspapers. Recoletos this month introduced in Spain a free newspaper similar to Rumbo, called Que!, distributed in 12 Spanish cities with local content tailored for each location. Like Rumbo, Que! is attempting to publish as many dailies as possible with a relatively small staff.
Mr. Friedland, who oversees an editorial staff of 86, has pushed Rumbo to combine local reporting and explanatory features intended to assist readers in adapting to life in the United States with colorful illustrations and sophisticated commentary. Each of Rumbo's editions makes a priority of local news. For instance, the Valley edition often has a photo on its front page of Gloria Trevi, the Mexican actress who has a home in McAllen near the Mexican border. On the same day, the Houston edition might make its top story an explanation of a new municipal measure called for towing any car stopped on the city's freeways.
But the editors of each edition are encouraged in a daily conference call to carry articles from other cities for their sections on state news. Editors at the main newsroom in San Antonio use a real-time editing system developed in Spain that allows them to monitor the entire system as the four papers come together. Wireless technology gives them the option of closing each night's edition for the four locations from a laptop computer.
Rumbo's employees come from a dozen Spanish-speaking countries and its staff ranks among the best educated of any newspaper in Texas. Employees have been attracted by salaries considerably higher than those at existing family-owned Spanish-language newspapers and comparable to salaries at large Texas English-language dailies, starting at more than $30,000 a year for young reporters and easily climbing to more than double that amount for experienced reporters and editors.
"We do not pay ghetto rates," said Mr. Schumacher Matos, who was born in Colombia and also worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times before going to The Journal.
To attract more readers, Rumbo is experimenting with some free distribution in addition to selling its newspapers. And it is planning to exchange articles with newspapers in Colombia and Central America to provide readers with sports coverage from their home nations that is unavailable from news services.
Despite the recognition Rumbo has received for its editorial creativity, it will have to consolidate a commercial base if it hopes to grow in Texas and beyond.
"At this point they've shown they can do quality journalism in an innovative, post-Web fashion," said Rosental C. Alves, who follows Hispanic media companies as director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas. "The challenge ahead for them is in marketing, sales and circulation. That relationship with their market has to be established soon for them to survive."
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