From HISPANIC Magazine's APRIL 2006 Issue

The News En Español

With the recent acquisitions of leading Spanish-language newspapers La Prensa and El Mensajero in Central Florida and the San Francisco area, Impremedia has solidified its position as the premier Spanish-language publisher of newspapers in the U.S. Also under the company’s banner are New York City’s El Diario/La Prensa, Los Angeles’ La Opinión and Chicago’s La Raza. We turned to Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, executive editor of El Diario/La Prensa, the nation’s oldest Spanish- language newspaper, to take the pulse of news en español at this critical moment.

HISPANIC: Tell us about your Latin roots.

Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush: My father was American, but of Greek origin. He actually grew up in Colombia. And my grandparents from his family lived in Mexico for a long time as well. My mother’s family is Guatemalan, but her family also lived in Mexico for a time and that was where my parents met.

H: How did you wind up in the U.S.?

AVB: My father worked for Rayovac, whose multinational headquarters were in Philadelphia. Eventually he climbed high enough in the company to have his offices there. And that’s where I grew up, outside of Philadelphia. I moved there when I was 16.

H: How did your career as a journalist develop?

AVB: I studied international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and I received a master’s in political science at Yale. Then I worked as a researcher at the Council of Foreign Relations, a centrist political think tank in New York City. And then I figured out that I didn’t want to be an academic after all, and I made the switch to journalism and I worked at Time magazine [and was] managing editor at ArtNews.

H: What was the biggest factor for you in accepting the executive editorship of El Diario/ La Prensa?

AVB: This is a very exciting moment for the Latino population in the U.S. not only … in New York … but also in Los Angeles, where you have the first Latino mayor in over a hundred years. You have a moment in the Latino community, politically, where that community is stepping up. Demographically, you have a Hispanic population that is over 40 million strong, in which one of every five children in the U.S. is now of Hispanic descent.

H: How have things changed politically for Hispanics?

AVB: Twenty years ago they spoke of the Hispanic population in terms of pockets, which is to say that in some parts of the country they were important demographically, and elsewhere companies and politicians could basically ignore them. Well, that’s no longer the case. The Hispanic population is a national population anywhere from the South to the Midwest to the Northeast. And it’s a growing national population, one that is increasingly casting a shadow in terms of marketing, and businesses, and economic infl uence and also, quite clearly, in terms of political infl uence. So this is a critical moment, a moment pregnant with possibility, and it’s exciting to be leading such an old and established Spanish-language newspaper in arguably the most important city for Latinos in the U.S. at this time.

H: What issues are most important to your readers?

AVB: Well, everybody talks about globalization. What they mean is that there are three major trends reshaping societies around the world. These are: shifting economic fl ows, the movement of people across borders, and the interconnectivity of culture. And when you look at it that way, then the readers of El Diario/La Prensa embody these three trends. We are, and I include myself, the children of globalization. The money we send home is more important to the Dominican Republic than sugar, to Guatemala than coffee, and to Mexico than oil. We are at the forefront of citizenship and dual nationality issues both for the countries we left and the city we live in. Our facility and comfort with multiple cultural traditions and languages make us key interlocutors in an increasingly interconnected world.

H: How does globalization play itself out in your community?

AVB: Queens, New York, today, is like, in many ways a neighboring village of Puebla, Mexico. Or the Bronx, New York, is affected intrinsically by events that happen in Santo Domingo, in ways that are immediate and instantaneous. And this works vice versa: Puebla, Mexico and Santo Domingo are affected by events that happen in Queens and the Bronx. This is the new geography of the world, one in which spatial relationships are far less important than the connections that exist across cultures transnationally.

H: What direction are you taking El Diario as executive editor?

AVB: One of the things that I want for it to continue doing and do better is to help and raise the issues of the Hispanic and Latino communities and of working New Yorkers in ways that are not addressed by the English-language press. El Diario/La Prensa covers local news—the kind of information that helps us navigate our daily lives—and we pay attention to the Hispanic neighborhoods often ignored by the English-language media. But more than that, we also recognize that local stories have international implications, and international ones have local effects. Our communities are not restricted to our locality. And that’s exactly what El Diario needs to cover, that nexus, that conjunction.

H: What’s the future for El Diario/La Prensa?

AVB: The importance of newspapers will continue to increase; the question is what shape will newspapers have in the future? Newspapers are a remarkable technology. They use an 18th century technology that is still relevant. They are the most effi cient and attractive way we have of informing ourselves about what is happening in the world around us. There are certain things that newspapers used to do that are no longer necessary. Other media do much better there, but there are certain things that newspapers do that other media just have never learned to do or don’t do very well at all. So I think it’s a matter of newspapers not being afraid of new technologies and not being afraid of doing what newspapers do best, but realizing as well that the times have changed.

H