Markets is a word easily thrown about, especially in the changing landscape of television.  One definition of market is the old trying to catch up to the new – and to the news, perhaps.  In the roiled television industry, ‘market’ could also be defined as networks discovering they stood in the way of history.  Certainly, television has scrambled to catch up with the social media, and it has begun finally to move away from an old demography on which it has been stuck that each day applies less and less to the only definition of markets that ultimately matters – a way to make money.

Television creates as many markets as it discovers.  Television created the modern market as much as the explorers created a ‘new’ world – through voyages of discovery of new geography, new demography, new technology.  Markets often exist for years before they are discovered.  The modern HispanicLatino market is not new by any means but, having materialized to some only recently, it is therefore recently discovered.  In any case, it is testing the ability of television to deliver for consumer and advertiser alike.

For so long, television was just there: Three networks entertaining and informing a market presumed to be unified.  Into this unitary market HispanicLatinos were brought along as any other segment of society.  My very intelligent father, who refused to speak English although he knew it, would not miss an episode of Bewitched.  In shorthand Spanish he would say, Ponle hay, con la brujita, referring to the channel he wanted. Put it there, with the little witch.  Would he – and we – have watched Elizabeth Montgomery if Univision or Telemundo or Telefutura or Azteca or Galavsion or Mundo2 had been around 40 years ago in West Texas?  When the household sat for days in front of the television set during the Cuban Missile Crisis (with my father’s newly cleaned rifle standing in the closet just in case the Russians invaded) or later when John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas – would he have wanted to watch English- or Spanish- language reporting?  What if the network-to-watch-on-breaking-news, CNN, had been around?  How would Univision or Telemundo have covered these events or the Bay of Pigs, for that matter?

These questions create corporate anxiety in a day when even in North Dakota anyone can watch a soccer game live from Buenos Aires or from Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid.  Television management now is trying to chase down the HispanicLatino market after having left it behind at the advent of the modern age that created so many new markets.  Indeed, the non-HispanicLatino population is not what it was only 20 years ago and neither is the HispanicLatino population – not just in numbers but also in self-perception.  As the old demography collapses, the old market can no longer grow along the same pattern – for either English- or Spanish-language networks, mind you.  So out come the new strategies and the casting about for new ways to capture a market that is out there, always has been, always will be – and, just to make things interesting, is finding and remaking itself.

No one disputes that television changes us.  Same-sex marriage anyone?  Had Univision existed in the high plains of Texas, miles removed from the border with Mexico, the HispanicLatino demographic would be different altogether.  On the other hand, people do change television, and the mostly English-speaking HispanicLatino population retains a cultural undertow fed by geography and a changing demography whose rhythms must be calibrated correctly lest they disrupt more of what we think we know.

The new identity HispanicLatinos must develop to succeed in the new world now formed around them will emerge from that market – and the pressures on that market.  The resulting human drama forms the bulk of what – and how – news organizations cover this decisive point in history.  Who HispanicLatinos are and how different they are from the most recent reiteration of what it means to be an American – including socio-economic realities – are the facts that all industries have to address strategically in public.  But these are the realities that HispanicLatinos confront individually and privately each day of their lives, creating new markets in the process.  And this ongoing growth, above all else, is the most important.

Whoever understands how these pieces come together on a daily basis will make of these new markets a success.  Asking the right questions is as important as understanding the answers.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.