In The Community
Thanks to the diligence of local and national news outlets, we know initial calls to alert authorities that the Dali was drifting out of control potentially saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives. We also know that as officials worked to stop bridge traffic in those crucial moments, they also discussed next steps over radio chatter, including alerting any work crews to leave the bridge.
Bridge personnel halted traffic but didn’t evacuate seven bridge workers — why?
The answer is unclear because while most media reported on the collapse’s economic impact and efforts to reopen, too few asked relevant questions about the largest tragedy of them all: the six people who lost their lives that day. They left behind children, spouses, and families dependent on their wages, yet commerce and bridge infrastructure dominated headlines.
The six workers who died, all from Latin American countries, were doing everyday jobs often overlooked and, for Latinos, disproportionately more dangerous. Where was the reporting about the lack of life-saving communication to these workers?
We can discern from past patterns that the lives of non-white Americans are portrayed differently than their white counterparts. When white women go missing, headlines blare. By contrast, according to a 2016 analysis by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, only about 1 in 5 missing person cases involving people of color are covered by the news media. When farm workers are caught in insidious climate catastrophes, their plights are rarely reported.
When seven bridge workers plunge into the cold and murky depths of the Patapsco River, too few ask why.
Latino media in crisis
As another critical presidential election nears, there’s plenty of hand-wringing around the growing U.S. news crisis. And rightly so. At a time when Americans need and deserve relevant, trustworthy information the most, newsrooms continue to reel from closures (2.5 newsrooms shutting down each week, on average), layoffs (nearly 2,400 already this year), consumer mistrust (39% of Americans have zero confidence in U.S. media), and plummeting revenues (down more than 50% since 2005).
For independent Latino media, however, the hand-wringing is all too familiar. There has never been a time when Latino media wasn’t in crisis. When U.S. newsrooms were rolling in multimillion-dollar investments and acquisitions, Latino media outlets were living hand-to-mouth while doing their absolute best to keep 64 million U.S. Latinos informed and accurately represented in media narratives.
To the uninformed, the combination of false stereotypes (‘all Latinos speak and prefer their news in Spanish”) and the outsized influence of multibillion-dollar media behemoths (Univision and Telemundo) might make it easy to believe that U.S. Latinos are well served.
There is nothing further from the truth.
To be clear, Latinos prefer consuming information in English, Spanish, and bilingually. Latinos aren’t a monolith in race, culture, or language. Many speak only English (31%), many speak only Spanish (an estimated 19%), and most speak both (75%), and to add further nuance, fluency or language dominance doesn’t pre-determine preference.
By one count, the nation’s 64 million Latinos are informed by just 558 media operators — a generous estimate when you consider that most of them publish through outdated print and broadcast models, have no dedicated newsroom staff, or don’t produce original content at all. If Puerto Rico is included, that number goes up to 624. While much attention is paid to the disappearance of local news, Latino media ends up lost among “ethnic outlets that fly below the radar and receive scant attention beyond the communities they serve,” per the authors of the “State of Local News 2023.” As a result, researchers opt to skip these outlets and promise to “delve more deeply” in future reports with no determined publication dates.
It’s difficult to know exactly how many Latino media operators exist and who they reach today because the last known deep dive media landscape study was done in 2019 by the Newmark Journalism School at CUNY — a year before the global pandemic accelerated the demise of newsrooms and media platforms across the country. (The CUNY team is preparing an update this fall.)
We don’t have a recent survey of how many Latino journalists are out of work, either, but we do know that even in places like Los Angeles County, where 49% of the population is Latino, the Los Angeles Times didn’t hesitate to pad its profit margin with a chopping block layered thick with Latino and other diverse journalists.
When Aquí, the national civil rights organization, wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times asking for the reasoning behind gutting their Latino staff, leadership didn’t even bother to respond.
Is it any wonder then, why Latinos are so misunderstood, disenfranchised, and hard to reach?
Latinos generate $3.2 trillion dollars in GDP; if Latinos were a country, they’d have the fifth-largest economy in the world. They start businesses at a higher rate than any other group. They spend more time than anyone else streaming music, film, and entertainment, contributing an estimated $2.9 billion in box office receipts per year. They also dominate service jobs.
In recent years, nearly 1.2 million Americans lost their lives to a terrifying new virus, yet service workers, dubbed “essential workers” were asked to keep working to the benefit of everyone else. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 45% of Hispanic adults worked at jobs requiring them to work outside their homes during the worst of the pandemic. Latinos did what was needed for their families, their communities, and their country.
Yet when it came time to protect themselves with a vaccine, Latino and Black Americans were the least likely to get them compared to their white counterparts. Research has attributed these lower vaccination rates to various causes, such as exposure to misinformation, mistrust in the U.S. healthcare system due to historical injustices, uncertainty about eligibility, and discrepancies in the availability and distribution of vaccines.
Disinformation took root before fact-based information ever could. The truth never stood a chance. How many lives were lost because mainstream media didn’t know how to, or simply didn't bother prioritizing this community? How many lives could have been saved if more than 500 mostly small and underfunded outlets existed to reach 64 million people?
Introducing the Latino Media Consortium
Illustration by Sayuri Jimenez
By 2030, the Latino population will swell to 72 million. Latinos are integral to our culture, economy, and the American story, and yet, they remain practically invisible in the American media landscape.
As many philanthropic foundations, organized and inspired by the Press Forward movement, are mobilizing to inject at least $500 million into local news to attempt to save American media, we applaud the much-needed and exemplary commitment that the coalition of Press Forward funders have made through their individually aligned and Press Forward grant-making processes.
The utter dire state of Latino media, however, has made it increasingly clear that we need to highlight just how necessary it is to invest equitably in Latino media infrastructure. Nine Latino media operators — led by Lucy Flores, co-founder of Luz Media, and Amanda Zamora, co-founder of the 19th News and founder of Agencia Media, and supported by the Valiente Fund and the Latino Community Foundation — launched the Latino Media Consortium to pursue this goal.
Collectively, Latino Media Consortium publishers serve national and local audiences, immigrants and U.S.-born; they are nonprofit and for-profit and serve Latinos in their preferred languages of English, Spanish, or both. They report on issues fundamental to Latino lives —health care, child care, education, labor issues, government systems, and more— as well as the food, film, music, and culture that tie our communities together.
And they are growing. Latino Media Consortium publishers collectively grew their digital U.S. reach by 48% in the last year. Together, they serve more than 1.4 million people — nearly 4% of the Latino digital news market — across websites, social media, WhatsApp, events, broadcasts, and podcasts. With comparatively scant budgets and under-resourced newsrooms, these Latino media operators are growing because they have the trust of Latino audiences that mainstream media doesn’t.
And they deserve transformative investment.
Latinos continue to give to this country, rarely asking for anything in return other than what they earned. But we are asking now, on behalf of the nation’s 64 million Latinos, for equitable investment in an imperative that’s necessary in order to preserve a free and functioning democracy. Record numbers of Latinos become eligible to vote every year, and every single year, we see record Latino voter turnout in elections across the country. To continue to allow such a vital constituency to remain woefully uninformed, vulnerable, and confused is immoral at worst and democratic malpractice at best.
Over the next five years, the Consortium aims to raise and distribute $100 million in transformative grants for an entire ecosystem of publishers serving digital-first, Latino audiences. We are putting journalists back to work; producing news, information, and culturally relevant content; and capacity building such as grant-writing, business development, operations, and product development. A robust investment in the entire ecosystem is crucial to helping these news and media organizations scale and sustain their operations for the long term.
This country and this community need and deserve nothing less.
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Join us: Contact info@wearelatinomedia.org for more information, download our deck, and sign up to get occasional consortium updates delivered to your inbox.
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The members of the Latino Media Consortium are:
Agencia Media
palabra (a multimedia publication created by NAHJ)
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