Chicago is the World

Café is Brewing

By: Angela Evans

The flavor is by chance. The moment is now. The topics are international. El café esta caliente.

Alejandro Riera, editor in chief of Café Media, LLC explains that his company, along with the rest of the media landscape, is undergoing a transition.

Literally, so. But, in this case, it was a good transition.

The modest, urban offices of Café Media were to be relocated the coming week to a larger space. They needed more room because of the growth of the company, which got its start two years ago as  pretty much of a risky bet.

Café Media was born amid an economic recession, countering financial adversity and onlookers’ doubts. Nowadays, however, it is going strong and focused as ever on its original target.

“Café media was created with the intention of providing content to an under-served segment of the Hispanic population,” says Riera.

“The reality is that in the last 10-15 years those of us who work in the Hispanic market have done an excellent job pushing Spanish language media. That is newspapers, radio, television– but there’s this growing number of 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd generation Hispanics born in the US, raised in the US, who have a strong foothold in both their paternal and maternal cultures back in Latin America and their Latin American culture in the US. There’s very little media that addresses those needs in English,” he says.

Café Media seeks to address those needs, and perhaps even establish a model for how to do so. Though the print magazine is Café’s primary media vehicle, Riera, 45, explains that the company has truly become a multi-level platform for modern Hispanic media.

The first issue of the magazine was published in October 2008. It is published bi-monthly with 45,000 copies in circulation. While 25,000 of those copies are distributed throughout Chicagoland and nearby suburbs, the other 20,000 are mail subscriptions. These subscribers are primarily based in Chicago, LA, Houston and New York.

Café wants to engage Latino readers with the issues currently impacting their lives and that of the Hispanic community through a myriad of means. There is online content available to Café’s community of readers, including features and articles from the magazine, blogs for different days of the week, reviews, recommended videos and more.

Café utilizes social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to foster dialogue with and amongst readers. And there are also “Pick Up Parties” hosted to release their latest print copy of the magazine directly into its readers’ hands.

Increasing their web presence was one of Café Media’s primary successes. Because the economy was just beginning to decline when the company began, advertisers were tightening their budgets, and not as willing to risk investing in a product that wasn’t a sure bet.

“Our big challenge was to convince them of the viability of this particular target audience, and the viability of the magazine. That being said that crisis, the economic crisis that we faced early last year forced us to rethink our company structure…and it behooved us to seriously start exploring how to exploit our digital capabilities.”

Things have changed since Alejandro Riera began his foray into publishing, a career he says chose him rather than the other way around. Riera wanted to work in Hispanic television, and was noticed early on by an editor from the Tribune who approached him for ideas after seeing his work with English and Spanish programming on Chicago’s Access Network. Thus began Riera’s career with the Tribune.

Riera later began freelancing for Exito before they hired him on, and eventually held a senior manager role for each division of Hoy.

Riera was excited to step out of his comfort zone, telling stories the way they have also been told in Spanish media, when he jumped on board with Café Media a few months after it was a functioning company birthed from the mind of Julian Posada.

He describes himself as a creature of the moment, and one who bores easily. He felt confident enough in Café Media’s ability to deliver, albeit comments from people questioning the sanity of his decision.

Riera says he likes to tackle the projects right in front of him before moving on to the next thing. And the next thing for Café Media this following year looks a lot like expansion.

Indeed, they have already taken small steps towards this.

Because the content is broad enough to garner national interest, Riera doesn’t see why something in the magazine wouldn’t be of interest to one person or another. And so, he wants to keep tapping into stories from places outside of Chicago, growing both readership and advertisers.

As for himself, Riera, who clearly believes the possibilities ahead for his company, asks, “Myself? Well, I say how far can I go with this?”

And for now, he plans to keep trekking forward- no end in sight.

Angela Evans is an intern with the Community Media Workshop