Changing to survive
Nelson Guadrado runs his hands over the front page. He has a new plan, a new strategy for business and he feels very proud about it. It is not just ready yet but he is sure it will do well. Like everything else has.
He feels good, indeed, about his newspaper, La Prensa.
Four years after starting the paper, its circulation is up to 15,000 and not falling.There are ads which is a miracle today. Every week he comes up with enough ads for the payroll for the two-dozen folks that La Prensa supports, and for that he is thankful.
But he is restless.
To keep the paper growing, he wants to expand so he can catch the Latino population that is moving around and is sprawled along the West and North Side. He wants to keep ads coming so he has been posting videos about restaurants and businesses and that has been bringing in money. He wants to keep people connected to the newspaper so he puts up as much as many videos as he can about community issues and Diego Giraldo, a Colombiano, boasts of having more contacts than he needs to keep the videos and stories coming. And the webpage is updated daily. The day Lou Dobbs quits, La Prensa has a picture and story of about his leaving CNN.
His website name was a brilliant snare. La Prensa US. Most of Latin America has a newspaper called La Prensa and so people have come calling on his website, bringing in as much as 1 million hits a month.
“In the beginning it was hard,” says Nelson who came here over a decade ago from Ecuador. But not today.
Stephen
Comments
No Comments