Ethnic Media Report : La Opinion
La Opinion is a Spanish- Language newspaper serving the Latino community first founded in September 16, 1926, in Los Angeles, California. It has remained in there since then because Los Angeles holds the Untied State’s largest Hispanic population. La Opinion also happens to be Los Angeles second most read newspaper.
La Opinion has always been in possession of the Lozano family until May of 2012 where the Lozano family sold its assets to an Argentine newspaper. It was founded by Ignacio E. Lozano 13 years after he emigrated from Mexico to Texas. In its early stages La Opinion was primarily made up of news from Mexico in response to the reading preferences of its audience, that happen to be at the time recently emigrated Mexicans. The stories were composed of deportations and repartitions.
Although now the news is mainly for people living in the Los Angeles County to inform them about the local news and national news its roots began with immigration issue coverage which makes this paper an immigrant newspaper. Like many newspapers the actually pages where their content is printed used to be broadsheets up until September 2014 when they began to use the tabloid format, (11*17) which is approximately half the size of a broadsheet.
La Opinion according to Jacqueline Garcia (a reporter) is in charge of informing Latino community and immigrants who are only Spanish speaking. The news outlet is there also because there are many English language news outlets in mainstream media where there are a lot of Spanish speaking people. Lozano and Garcia both think that it is important to have a news outlet that tailors to the language that the population speaks rather than try to make all of the immigrant learn English.
The people that this paper targets by age group is anyone who will read it but in reality the people it draws are people over the age of around 35 because the main way of distribution is through print. La Opinion prints out over 100,000 prints Monday- Friday and on the weekend a combined total of approximately 90,000. Because of this there is very little outreach to the younger population who is more into online usage and will more than likely not pick up a newspaper. The older people as said by Garcia cannot navigate through the internet as easily as younger people can and if the print edition where to be removed then it would be nearly impossible for any of the older people to read any of the news published. There are efforts to change this by La Opinion, they have a mobile access to their main webpage and all of their stories are being posted online as well as in print. Readership for the online content is mainly by younger individuals who again refuse to pick up a newspaper and will only read the stories online in a digital version.
La Opinion used to have their reporters divided into beats but this is no longer the case according to Garcia. Now the reporters and editors have been cut down to a much smaller size and they must now focus on a certain area with in Los Angeles County.
The area of coverage is based primarily in the Los Angeles county area that ranges from Long Beach all the way to Palmdale. It is not limited to Los Angeles Garcia explained. “I can cover a story in Orange County if they really want me too, but for the most part the farthest I go is to Monrovia,” Said Garcia.
The audience is mainly Los Angeles but Garcia stated that she has gotten emails and messages from other states like Arizona, telling her what a great job she has done with the stories she writes. This is due to the online content because this can reach much further than a newspaper can due to it availability anywhere there is an internet connection.
According to Garcia the most used social media platforms is Twitter and Periscope and this is mainly to post links to the stories online and so reporters like Garcia can easily comment back to people via Twitter and Periscope. Apart from reaching out to people indirectly through posts an interesting thing that I found out was that Garcia uses social media to find people. For example, Garcia uses the app to find the loved ones of a deceased person so that she can interview them for a story she needs to write about the deceased person.
Garcia says that there needs to be more outreach to young people because there is very little readership for people who are under the age of 35 because many of them get their news via apps and La Opinion doesn’t have one. Garcia says there are rumors that they might start an app soon but so far there is nothing. Garcia feel as if there will be a lot more people reading La Opinion if there was an app and thus it will ensure the future of La Opinion by securing an audience long after their current audience of older people pass away.
In my opinion La Opinion is not for me I don’t relate to most of the content and I prefer to read in English. I do like the fact that they still publish in print rather than change to all online content because I think is gives the outlet a tradition to hold onto and remember the path it took to be as big as it is now.