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

Another profile of Chicago’s ethnic news media

Esfuerzo de Amor

By Angela Evans

Sunlight streams through the windows of café Macondo in Chicago’s Lincoln Square.  Beams of light dance across the warm, neutral shades and rich red tones of the walls, and on Spanish language posters.  On one wall the shelves are jammed with  books that tell about Hispanic culture via music or film or jewelry.

It is fitting that the creator of arteyvidachicago.com should choose this place for an  interview.

Amor Montes de Oca is a smiling, spirited woman. She is small with thick, cascading dark hair. She is dressed simply in a black turtleneck, jeans and a plaid scarf tied snugly around her neck. Something about her is subtle, yet knowing.

Oh, and Amor stands up to greet you with a friendly hug upon first meeting.

The labor of her love the past two years has been the Hispanic arts and cultural calendar of events website, aptly called arteyvidachicago.com.

What began as a simple endeavor to offer a comprehensive listing of high-quality events for Chicago’s Hispanic community, has evolved to include: artist galleries, links to various Hispanic organizations, music reviews and the brand new book reviews— with more on the horizon.

Montes de Oca, 38, came from Mexico City a little over 20 years ago and Chicago has been her home base since then. She studied fine art at DePaul University and is now a photo researcher for educational publishers. Though she also considers her website a full-time job as it requires most of her free time.

Since Montes de Oca has always been involved in the arts one way or another, she found that she was always recommending events she thought worthwhile to people in her circle. Because she was always scrounging through various websites and publications to identify such events, she decided she could put it in one place that it would be available to more people.

“They wouldn’t be discouraged to not find anything if the information was not readily available…Instead of going to 10 different websites, they could just go to one,” she says. “The purpose was to connect the organizations with this programming to the audience.”

Many of the organizations that host cultural events are catering to a niche audience, she says. And because the organizations are usually small in nature, they often don’t have the budget for marketing to reach their intended audience, she explains.

The worst-case scenario occurs when these organizations have to cancel events due to this lack of audience, she adds.

And so, she decided she would do something.

She wanted to help musicians avoid empty nightclubs and gatherings. And she wanted to make sure the community was aware of the organizations holding exhibits and lectures.

The connection between programming and the audience seemed to be missing. And so, she put the two together, giving birth to arteyvidachicago.com.

While Montes de Oca describes her website as “one-man band,” she did receive help from a few key individuals.

Her husband, David Derr, a graphic designer, helped her with the logo and other design elements. The technical person who developed the format for the website made it easy for her to use as well as very user friendly. Catalina Maria Johnson, Ph.D., writer and host/producer of “Beat Latino”, rounds out the mix with her contribution of music reviews.

As for the website’s appearance, the maroon color of its background is immediately attention-grabbing, while the smaller boxes housing illustrated logos or words of affiliated organizations on each side of the homepage pose as interesting, complimentary details to the layout of the page.

“That’s something that ran parallel to the richness and diversity of how art and cultural events can be,” Montes de Oca explains. “Also, it parallels with the richness of the Hispanic culture- it’s so vast and vibrant and significant as well as diverse. So I wanted to be sure that it was attractive to capture the attention of the Hispanic community, but also any other community that had any interest in world culture. It’s not for Hispanics, it’s for everyone.”

Leo Suarez, 25, owner of Macondo, is friends with Montes de Oca and has collaborated with her on marketing plans for the café and various musical events. Suarez says Montes de Oca stands out because of her willingness is to help out, even with things that have nothing to do with her. “She always has tons of ideas,” he says.

When Macondo first opened, Suarez says they had people coming in mentioning, “Oh we read about you guys on arteyvida.”

This is how Montes de Oca is made aware that the connection has been made. Verbal confirmation at arteyvida promoted events. “I would like to think that maybe they would not have gone had they not received that information from my website.”

Web visits boasting an increasingly steady 70 percent reader return rate also provides a good indication.

On one occasion in particular, a gentleman came up to her at a Les Nubians performance she helped set up. The man was explaining to Montes de Oca how grateful he was for her putting the show together, because it was sort of perfect timing. He was searching for an anniversary gift for his wife, read about the show in arteyvida’s newsletter, and so bought tickets for the event. His wife was surprised and they attended the show with a slew of their friends.

Montes de Oca was flattered to hear this. She thought it would make their anniversary even more memorable if the couple could meet the artist personally. So she took them back stage. She recounts the couple taking pictures, hanging out and having a good time. Montes de Oca expresses how glad she was to be allowed the opportunity to make their experience that much more memorable. She credits the website for this.

Montes de Oca has a strong vision for developing her website, but time is her biggest hurdle.

She recognizes the importance of pacing herself with the website because she does not want to compromise the quality of the product she is providing to her audience.

Maintaining the website has not only impacted the community it serves, but it has also directly affected Montes de Oca herself.

“I am well-informed,” she chuckles good-naturedly. “It serves two purposes, it helps me as a person and as an art patron and fan know what’s going on. As well as, I attend a lot of these events myself. I’m even more motivated to go. I take my family. It gives me an opportunity to take my son and show him something cool, something new.”

Hopefully, future voyeurs to arteyvidachicago.com will also discover something cool, something new, just as well.

(Angela Evans is an intern with the Community Media Workshop)