Latino journalists and news industry observers say Alden Global Capital’s quiet cancellation of The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Spanish-language weekly is a blow to the region’s second largest population at a critical time.
They argue the end of The Union-Tribune en Español comes in an era when more Spanish-language media is needed, not less, as the nation gears up for local, state and federal elections this year.
“It’s especially important during an election year for a publication to have information in both languages,” said Hiram Soto, former staffer and columnist of the U-T en Español when it was called Enlace. "(The closure) generates a gap in information that leads to less informed voters and leads to less engaged voters. It’s just really a slap in the face of the community.”
The Union-Tribune published its final edition of the U-T en Español on Dec. 30, marking the end of a nearly 25-year run in which the newspaper published a Spanish-language edition. Two reporters and an editor were let go as a result, according to sources within the organization.
Neither the Union-Tribune nor Alden, the private equity firm that bought the newspaper last year, issued a statement on the decision. Both ignored requests for comment from KPBS.
No numbers are available on the circulation of the U-T en Español, but it served a county where 35% of 3 million residents are Latino and 150,000 cross the border with Mexico each day. The Spanish-language edition began in 2000 and was widely read by Latinos from all walks of life, Soto said. He added that it was viewed as a public service and an attempt at inclusivity.
“Before this publication, the Union Tribune's coverage of immigrant communities, of Latino communities, of border communities, were very centered on crime and drug trafficking,” Soto said. “When this publication opened, it broadened it to cover the arts, community leaders. It uplifted people that were doing real change in the community. It focused a lot on social issues impacting the community every day.”
News industry watchers say they are not surprised at the decision by Alden, which has a track record of making deep cuts to newspapers after purchasing them.
“They seem to have very relatively little interest in having anything more than sort of the bare minimum of a newspaper that will appeal to loyal forever readers,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute.
Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, says the move to end the Spanish-language weekly was likely driven by the bottom line.
“Alden is going to jettison what it views as its most costly or least profitable pieces of its operation,” Franklin said. “They have a history of doing that across the country.”
Franklin added that the U-T en Español's demise is consistent with a nationwide trend that has only accelerated in the pandemic era.
“In 2020, there were about 900 ethnic media outlets in the United States,” Franklin said, citing a Medill database on local news organizations that he maintains. “We've lost 173 of those in the last three years since the pandemic. And of the 173 that closed, 106 were Latino publications, most of those Spanish-language publications.”
He explained that many ethnic media outlets never recovered from the loss of advertising revenue during the pandemic when people stopped shopping, as well as the closures of small mom-and-pop retailers.
The National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) is so concerned with the Spanish-language media decline that it has formed a rapid response team on the issue. Arelis Hernandez, vice president for print with NAHJ, said the group strives to meet with news organizations to understand “the reasoning behind” the decisions to shutter the outlets.
She said the U-T en Español closure, the disbanding of the Dallas Morning Herald’s Spanish-language newspaper last year and the discontinuation of The Washington Post’s Spanish-language podcast in 2022 don’t make sense.
“Latinos have grown to more than 19% of the population (nationwide), and we're continuing to grow,” Hernandez said. “There is a migrant population that is increasingly needing resources in their language to navigate this new world of the United States. It's just like we're not understanding the economics of this either, $3.4 trillion is the purchasing power of Latinos.”
Art Castañares, publisher of the Spanish-language weekly La Prensa San Diego, says what’s also not well understood is that even many bilingual people like to read their news in Spanish.
“It’s not just the language,” Castañares said. “It’s understanding the culture, the impact and being sensitive to that.”
Soto, who is now in public relations, says it’s also about another intangible. Trust. He said the U-T’s Spanish-language newspaper painstakingly built trust with local Latinos over the years through reporters’ presence at pivotal events and how they wrote about the community.
He brings up a case in point. As wildfires ripped through eastern San Diego County in October 2003, it was Soto — assigned to cover the farm workers — who told them through smoke-filled air they had to evacuate.
“You couldn't really breathe,” Soto said. “And they were still picking tomatoes and strawberries. They didn't even know that there were evacuation orders.”
The publication also covered in-depth the migrants who were burned to death atop Tecate Peak during the 2007 fires.
"I remember being embedded with the rescuers,” Soto said. “We found the bodies of people who were burnt. We told the stories of people who were lost crossing the border and the stories behind it and how people in the community rallied and provided the resources for rescuers to go and find their loved ones.”
Soto said those pieces told the region’s Latinos that the paper cared about them. He worries ending the U-T En Español means that’s no longer true.
