This NY Times article examines one of the most closely watched experiments in the publishing industry.
Rumbo (pronounced “ROOM-boh”) 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. Here is an earlier Houston Press story on Rumbo de Houston’s entry into the local newspaper market.
According to most demographers, Hispanics will become a majority in Texas by 2030 or so and are already the largest ethnic group in several of the state’s largest cities. Edward Schumacher Matos is a former Wall Street Journal editor who founded Rumbo last year with Jonathan Friedland, The Journal’s former Los Angeles bureau chief. Their business plan is to have Rumbo profitable by late 2007 or early 2008. Their bet is that the state’s growing Hispanic population is ready to support a sophisticated daily newspaper in Spanish that mixes coverage of local news and sports with commentary and dispatches from Latin America.
The Hispanic market already supports fast-growing Spanish-language television and radio industries, but Rumbo’s Texas venture is clearly the biggest gamble yet that has been placed on the Hispanic demand for daily news in Spanish. Rumbo’s combined circulation remains small (just under 100,000 a day), but the venture has already generated a market reaction in each of the markets Rumbo entered in recent months. The English language newspaper in each of those markets has reacted to Rumbo by creating or buying newspapers to compete with Rumbo’s tabloids.
As an aside, I am going to be on a panel with Carlos Puig, managing editor of RUMBO de Houston, on February 19 at the Houston Bar Association’s annual Law & the Media Seminar that will be discussing ways in which the media can maintain its independence in the face of legal and economic threats to it.