There are many tough executive-level jobs in corporate America today. The nation’s economy is being buffeted on all sides by foreign competition, skilled workers are at a premium and the nation’s infrastructure each day falls behind the rest of the world — among other issues. Few of those jobs are more challenging than leading a television network today (or a film production or advertising company for that matter).
Whether heading up an English-language or a Spanish-language operation – all are caught in some way by changing demographics; the evident and growing power of social media and new platforms; and an audience comprised of submarkets and subgroups hard to unify into a national market. It is nothing short of mayhem – and confused mayhem at that – exacerbated by business models that probably need to be revamped or scratched. Not surprisingly, rumors abound about the future of the current Spanish-language networks, the advent of news ones and the creation of new hybrids for English-dominant HispanicLatinos. ABC and Univision this week affirmed their intention to bring to life next year a new cable news channel that appeals to English-dominant HispanicLatinos.
The great difference between what HispanicLatinos want to see as entertainment and what they want to consume as news are two different issues and must be solved by a number of new approaches. Many HispanicLatinos are giving up on mainstream networks whose news programs do not even try to address their communities and whose entertainment programs leave so many HispanicLatinos feeling hollow – not exactly what a population that is still about the business of finding itself needs. That might explain why HispanicLatinos outrank other groups per capita in the use of social media. Likewise, tired of trying to shoehorn the HispanicLatino population into their current products, corporations are being forced to try new business lines after disasters orchestrated by that old nemesis, conventional thinking.
Some corporations in other industry sectors do not get it yet, but some do, and in the world of news, change is real. HispanicLatinos who are attuned to the future most likely get more from watching the likes of Fareed Zakaria on CNN along with Jorge Ramos on Univision than elsewhere. They present a wider understanding of this millennium’s version of the new world through a combination of domestic news with a highly-informed international perspective – which is what individuals in a globalized economy require. Zakaria and Ramos are to the new America what the old McNeil-Lehrer Newshour was for an earlier version of a country rediscovering itself as it began to undergo four decades of change but that left an exploding HispanicLatino population by the wayside. And José Díaz-Balart, God bless him, on Telemundo is certainly trying to catch up.
Interestingly, the inability of Telemundo once it was bought by NBC to gain significant share of the HispanicLatino market should be a case study for business schools throughout the country and for corporations considering new HispanicLatino ventures – followed closely by an examination of Univision’s own inability to understand its market fully over the years. As its natural market changed, Univision did not adapt to it so that now it is caught in the same problem as the other networks. In many ways Univision, then, is the process – like the rest of the HispanicLatino population – of expanding and redefining itself. But so is ABC, perhaps intelligently so.
The challenge always is about content and presentation. The leaders of news operations initially have to make sure that getting a slew of HispanicLatinos on air that hardly understands the demographics and experience of the HispanicLatino population nationwide is not the answer. On the entertainment side, another sitcom about another Mexican/Mexican-American family in LA would not just be a cliché, it would be an embarrassing cliché. The answer lies in inclusive balance.
Despite dropping immigration and reduced birth rates and increased deportations, the HispanicLatino population will still outpace the growth of the rest of the national population in the years to come – the result of everyone else’s birth rates dropping more so. Thus corporations are creating new channels and perhaps organizing entirely new networks, offering new kinds of websites and recasting knock-offs of popular talent shows.
One of the more interesting stories might be that of Fox, which has real, recent experience in launching a national enterprise. It, too, is organizing something new for the HispanicLatino market. If it does not create another version of its right-wing, English-language hate machine, Fox could be best positioned to take advantage of a reshaped market increasingly anchored by dual cultural realities. Fox’s sports offerings on Fox Deportes in fútbol and Fox Sports in football already serve a key, highly defined HispanicLatino demographic – something hard for other networks to claim.
Fox might or might not have the right people to do what needs to be done. But it does have the opportunity to do what ABC-Univision is doing – starting a new venture that should start from scratch and that has every reason to succeed if its input-decisions on content are not skewed and its news presentation is based on an authentic and honest knowledge of the market.
>>> Additional reading of possible interest:
http://www.hispaniclatino.com/2011/10/17/pssst-the-passat/
Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.