El Mensajero, the Spanish-language newspaper published weekly in San Francisco, has closed its local bureau after almost 30 years, and will now be edited from Chicago.
“The newspaper will continue in print and online, but with a virtual editor stationed in Chicago and a group of colleagues here in the bay,” Ricardo Ibarra said on Aug. 24, as he finished his last issue as editor. “Earlier this year, the editor [Ibarra’s predecessor] who was here for many years was dismissed … [and the staff] was gradually being cut back.”
El Mensajero is one of the few local Spanish-language publications left in the Bay Area. The new direction of the publication is the result of a clustering process that the formerly independent newspaper has suffered from over the last decade.
The publishing group ImpreMedia LLC—which funded the merger of the daily La Opinión in Los Angeles and El Diario la Prensa in New York—bought El Mensajero in 2004, and then acquired the weeklies La Raza in Chicago, La Prensa in Orlando, Hoy NY in New York and Rumbo in Houston.
In 2012, US Hispanic Media Inc., a subsidiary of the Argentinian company S.A. La Nación—which publishes the newspaper La Nación of Buenos Aires—became the largest shareholder of ImpreMedia.
“We are all in this economic model of scale and centralization to survive,” said Jesús Del Toro who, since the beginning of this year, has been in charge of the editorial operations of La Raza in Chicago, Rumbo in Houston, La Prensa in Orlando, and now El Mensajero in San Francisco. “My position is supervisor of weekly operations, to bring consistency.”
With economies of scale, Del Toro prefers a decrease of exclusive content generated locally, and an increase in generic content for use in various publications to maximize resources.
The first edition of El Mensajero was born on May 5, 1987 under the editorial leadership of Francisco Garcia, who worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.
“We were doing investigative journalism,” said Celina Rodriguez, who along with Dante Betteo, was a founding reporter. “For me it was a wonderful experience. I was very happy to provide alternative information to the Latino community, to address issues not touched before.”
Rodriguez does not hesitate to point out that the weekly will suffer without the presence of a local editor, particularly in its investigative coverage.
“It is a complete mistake. The communities—although they’re all Latin—are very different in different parts of the USA, even though the problems that afflict them are the same,” said Rodriguez. “It reflects the lack of weight of the Latino community in San Francisco.”
Ibarra shares this view: not having a local editor to oversee the newspaper is bad for El Mensajero.
“Establishing community relations, letting you meet, greet, shake hands … is most important,” Ibarra said. “It’s news that isn’t ‘mainstream,’ and if someone isn’t here to cover it, it’s not going to be covered.”
From what constituted the local staff employed by El Mensajero, only the distributors, freelance reporters and commissioned sales persons will remain, because “the idea is to sell, not keep what’s in the best interest of the newspaper,” Ibarra said.
Del Toro, however, has a different view.
“There have been administrative changes, but the production of content will continue to be produced locally,” said Del Toro. “El Mensajero is well appreciated by the community and we must continue serving it.”
Ibarra has no shortage of good memories from the four years he spent with the newspaper. “I won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for my community research on the education of Hispanics in San Francisco, and another from New America Media for a multimedia piece I did on the border,” he said.
But he thinks something is being lost. “We lose that connection we had with a community of two million Hispanics in the Bay Area through this news medium,” Ibarra said.