by Julio Urdaneta

Slowly but decisively, the Internet is becoming the new medium for Hispanic news ventures around the country. Several publications have ceased producing hard-copy editions altogether, placing their content on the Web or distributing through electronic formats.

Television and radio stations not only offer their fare on the web, but also construct programs exclusively for those media.

“More and more people are taking advantage of what the internet presents, and that includes Latino voices,” independent journalist Tracy Barnett, former editor of University of Missouri’s bilingual newspaper Adelante! says.

Advertising money is starting flow onto the Internet as Latinos become more technology savvy. Dollars spent on Hispanic Web sites are growing quickly. In 2007, ad spending for Hispanic-oriented Web sites increased 36 percent, from $132 million to $178 million, over the previous year, according to data compiled by the University of Northern Texas.

In 2006, the Internet represented 3.5 percent of the Hispanic media advertising pie. In 2007 the portion grew to 5 percent.

But some fear that as Hispanics grow more accustomed to using new technologies, formats and social networks such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to access information and entertainment, the Hispanic print media might have their days numbered if they don’t move quickly to adapt.

Veteran binational (Mexico-U.S.) newsman José Luis Benevides, who launched the Spanish language journalism program at the University of California-Northridge half a dozen years ago, says he’s learning new skills himself as he helps shape curricula to prepare students for tomorrow’s journalistic playing fields.

“We need to teach the students the value of our profession. That core value is not going to change,” he insists. “What is changing is the way we deliver information.

Students are required to learn how to deliver in different platforms.”

Adolfo Flores is one of those Northridge students. He’s a member of a new generation of Hispanic journalists. He’s learning internet-based skills in video and audio reporting and creating blogs. “Convergence is capital,” he says. “No one is thinking about diversity in the newsroom as they were before. Now they’re worried about newspapers shutting down.”

Alejandro Cortez, a reporter for Qué Pasa Media, a news company that embraces print, radio and the 2Internet in Raleigh, N.C., emphasizes, “Hispanic journalists must adjust to the new media. That’s where the future of journalism lays.”

Current Spanish-language heavyweights are entering the competition, investing resources to remain relevant in this Internet era. That includes making content available in English as well.

“The incursion into the Internet of major newspapers like La Opinión in Los Angeles and conglomerates like Univisión and Telemundo will increase, and surely they would try some sort of bilingual strategy,” veteran Mexican journalist Antonio Ruíz-Camacho, currently a Knight fellow at Stanford University, expects.

As the industry changes, Latino journalism — its veteran practitioners, its teachers and its new brigade of reporters — must make major adjustments to be marketable.

Benevides sees finding a balance between technological skills and thorough journalism reporting as the new paradigm schools face: “Students are required to learn more and more platforms, but what we’re concerned about is that these platforms give them less time to provide information to the public. We want to teach those skills that will allow students to go and research a particular story and then provide that information on various platforms.”

He adds, “What we are seeing is pretty hard to teach to students because we have this traditional area. They assume they will work in one particular medium and now these media are converging. Students must be very flexible.”

How one student is welcoming the challenge

by Adolfo Flores

When I enrolled in college to study journalism, I didn’t expect to be producing podcasts, soundslides and videos. But now, entering my final year at Cali­fornia State University at Northridge, I do it regularly — and I like the challenge and excitement it adds to my education.

As a student reporter, I get to tell stories using various formats — and two languages. Hispanic media will always be here as long as they embrace multimedia.

Last semester we posted stories, videos and sound slides while constructed and maintained a blog, too.

My school has given us the opportunity to try new things. At first, it was very experimental. At times we were learning along with our professors, which in a way made it better.

My initial projects weren’t that great, but they were a start. That’s how I’ve been preparing, just by practicing. I just went out and did it.

Now my school is offering a new media course, and its publications encourage and actually require multimedia.

A lot of us students feel right at home with media convergence. We grew up playing with our parents’ video cameras and surfing on Internet.

Carrying around an audio recorder, still camera and video camera, as opposed to just a pen and notepad, might seem tedious, but the opportunities new media provide give our stories more meaning. They can have more impact.

These are skills that are going to be required of us, that are going to make us more marketable, so it’s in our best interest to embrace them. But at the same time, it’s still important to understand the fundamentals and ethics of journalism, because they still apply.

(Julio Urdaneta is a reporter/editor with Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C. Adolfo Flores completed a “Washington experience” semester with the news service in 2007 as its first Sebastiana Mendoza Memorial Fellow. Email either care of julio@hispaniclink.org.) ©2009

by José de la Isla

I was one of the students hearing Professor Homer G. Barnett’s lectures on the history of anthropology at the University of Oregon the year before he retired. That was more than three decades ago.

Barnett was among reasons I was in graduate school at Oregon in the first place. He is largely responsible for how we think about “innovation” today. He tied it in with ideas about “culture change” and wrote a book using those words in the title. Also, he had been on the committee that had given me a very handsome scholarship. I had to pay my respects to this scholarly icon and take in his parting wisdom.

“There is no such thing as race,”I remember Prof. Barnett saying.

In those activist times, I could understand “equality” and “justice” as public values. But he was showing that science came into it through various researchers who had developed classification systems about genetic variation. They showed that people, like plants, can be of mixed and many characteristics.

All that was understandable.

But the lesson went further.

The one that stumped me was that some people could not see race at all. It wasn’t there. Well, that just seemed impossible. Of course you can see who is in front of you.

I was unconvinced, even if a study in Brazil suggested that people there could not see skin color and purported some white people were called black and some blacks white.

I was walking toward the university’s Knight Library when the realization struck me like a thunderbolt.

I was about 10 years old, in Miss Bowman’s room at De Zavala elementary school.

My classmate, Louis Sánchez, was black in that predominantly Mexican American school in segregated Texas. How could that be? More to the point, why — knowing for more than a decade — had I not realized it before now? For me, that was the empirical truth behind what Prof. Barnett was saying.

It is clear that we are literally conditioned to perceive one way or to not perceive another. For instance, remember the scene in the 2004 movie “What in the Bleep Do We Know!” showing how the native people had trouble perceiving the arrival of the first Europeans to the New World because they had no context for understanding invisible creatures who came in houses from the ocean?

The first native chronicles talked about half-man of no color and half-horse. It is proof that prior knowledge, belief, fear or goodwill shape what we perceive and how we see it. Anthropologists are among those, distinct from others who study policy and politics with a keen insight into how humans put together ideas about the world in whichwe live.

For that reason I was thrilled that the American Anthropological Association had mounted the exhibit “Race: Are We So Different?” at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. The cutting edge concept that questions the very concept of race that Barnett was talking about is now key, central, and mainstream. There is no such thing as race nor “racial” ­differences.

Instead, how we think about something shapes our reality of it.

It is surprising, but this is the first time an exhibition has been mounted in the United States to address race from the biological, cultural, and historical points of view. The timelines, dating from the 1600s to the present, include how recent race-based notions have crept into our consciousness, when some of them did not exist before, as with immigrants (see www.understandingrace.org/home.html).

If there is a great national purpose served by this important project, it is encapsulated in a quote from author James Baldwin, who said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

The exhibit will be on national tour through 2014. Like Professor. Barnett’s lectures, it will instruct us on how to innovate new thinking.

[José de la Isla’s latest book, Day Night Life Death Hope, is distributed by The Ford Foundation. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at joseisla3@yahoo.com] ©2009