The Latino Media Consortium is ‘community-first’ — here’s what that means, and why it matters

In the weeks since we launched the Latino Media Consortium, many have asked about our members — what types of media organizations do we support, and how did we choose them? 

Our inaugural class of LMC media operators include three local media organizations (Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language, cross-border news service based in Phoenix, Arizona; El Tecolote, a nonprofit newsroom serving Latinx San Franciscans with bilingual, grassroots journalism; and Enlace Latino NC, a Spanish-language news outlet serving North Carolina’s Latino immigrant communities) and five national organizations (LatinaMediaCo, which centers Latina and queer Latinx voices in media and cultural criticism; Luz Media, which challenges harmful and inaccurate media narratives about U.S. Latinas; Pulso, a nonprofit media startup covering news, history, and culture for Latinos; NAHJ’s palabra, a multimedia platform developing and elevating in-depth journalism by freelance Latino journalists; and The Latino Newsletter, a startup nonprofit reporting on politics through a Latino lens).

While we are eager to grow the Latino Media Consortium, we are beginning with this particular mix of organizations to demonstrate the breadth of our community’s information needs and the impact that transformational investment can have when accompanied by adaptive capacity-building and support. 

As we noted when we launched, our inaugural cohort serves “national and local audiences, immigrants and U.S.-born; they are nonprofit and for-profit and serve Latinos in their preferred languages of English, Spanish, or both. They report on issues fundamental to Latino lives — health care, child care, education, labor issues, government systems, and more — as well as the food, film, music, and culture that tie our communities together.” 

The keyword here being community. Most of the conversations about revitalizing news right now are happening at the local level — and for good reason. Even as research indicates greater trust in local news, our industry seems to be losing a war of attrition at the local level, with more than 2 newspapers shuttering every week — a pace that will reduce the total newspaper market by a third from its size in 2005. 

But this decline doesn’t begin to account for the lack of Latino media outlets, which are not fully captured in national studies on racial and ethnic media. Nor does it capture the persistent dearth of Latino representation in news and media, or the relationship between representation and trust among Latinos (despite international studies linking the two).

The Latino Media Consortium is prioritizing community-first media because we understand that Latinos’ information needs are as varied and diverse as we are. Those needs aren’t limited to geographical boundaries, and shared cultural values often encompass large swaths of regions or the entire nation itself. Our interests and consumption habits are often tied to age, language preference, and time spent in the United States, among other factors, and because Latinos aren’t a monolith, all 64 million of those Latinos live in every town, city, county, and state in the U.S. 

By taking a community-first approach, we are working to build a media ecosystem that reflects the range of lived experiences and everyday information needs of Latinos, at both the national and local levels, whether immigrant consumers need help navigating local schools in Spanish or third-generation Americans are seeking to learn more about their Latino roots and heritage in English. 

We’re proud of the work our inaugural cohort is doing to meet Latino readers wherever they are, and grateful to our partners at the Valiente Fund and the Latino Community Foundation who see the importance of a Latino media ecosystem that reflects the richness and diversity of our community. 

To learn more about our capacity-building and fundraising goals, check out our deck and reach out to info@wearelatinomedia.org to set up a call. We’d love to partner with you to support community-first media for Latinos at the national and local levels.