Why English-language content for Latinos is the future

It’s becoming difficult to keep track of how many media companies have made the same announcement lately: We’re launching a website/television network/social media campaign for a Latino audience, but in English.

Just in the last year-plus we’ve seen the launch of English-language digital ventures like Fox News Latino and HuffPost Latino Voices. A partnership between the latter and AOL has been involved in launching Spanish-English hyperlocal Patch Latino sites.

This week brought reports that Univision and Disney were working together to produce a 24-hour news channel for Latinos in English. It also brought the launch of Voxxi, a English-language website for “acculturated Latinos” headed by an editor from Spain’s EFE news agency. It’s one of a host of English-language sites, some more professional than others, that have launched in the past couple of years with the goal of reaching, well, acculturated Latinos.

There are other ventures in the works, most with an emphasis on digital content. What gives, and why now? Giovanni Rodriguez is a social-technology and marketing expert with Deloitte Consulting who studies and writes about the Latino media market. In a short piece last week for Forbes, he wrote about how media companies are “beginning to gain a finer grasp of the Latino population,” including their language and engagement preferences. Here, he provides details. READ MORE