Editorial: El Diario is committed to the community
For 101 years, El Diario/La Prensa has fulfilled our mission of serving New York’s Hispanic community, and we expect to continue with the same intensity, vocation and goodwill. After the relaunch of the print and digital versions of El Diario, we want to renew our commitment to our audience and to the community in the face of certain attacks. We’ve been accused of moving away from our readers, when reacting to changes in the media, focusing on a multimedia future and responding to the need to serve a broader, more diverse public are imperative in order to preserve the social function of journalism.
El Diario fights for our future and strives to continue being valuable to New York’s Latino community. We want to be closer to all Latinos. This community is increasingly diverse and influential, and expects The Champion of Hispanics to advocate for its rights and provide content that helps everyone live their lives better—the Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, Ecuadoran, Central American and South American communities, including people who have lived here for decades and recent arrivals. Our objective guides our daily work, since we’re part of the community.
When we reached out to our readers before the relaunch, they mentioned three ideas: El Diario belongs to everyone, is a bond between Latinos and helps people become part of the city. That is our objective, like what inspired Spaniard Rafael Viera to establish La Prensa in 1913 and José Camprubí—a Puerto Rican and brother-in-law of poet and Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramón Jiménez—to turn it into a daily. It was the first daily led by women, the wife and daughters of Camprubí, until it merged with El Diario to become a point of reference for the Puerto Rican and Dominican communities.
Facts and content define us. We want to better serve our long-time readers, but also attract new ones. That’s why we still offer information about immigration, are featuring and have expanded our presence in the celebrations of the various communities, and have developed new content covering the national economy, Latino entrepreneurs, women and families with our new section Para Ti and the Tu Sábado supplement. We’re publishing Vive NY, our daily community page; launched a special series about Latino neighborhoods; and started new pages about local soccer that complete our sports offerings along with a daily magazine and the Quiero Más Fútbol website. We have correspondents in Dominican Republic and Mexico and have expanded our coverage about Puerto Rico and Central America. Digital initiatives like Real Latin Moms and Somos Dreamers have earned recognition from the Ippies awards. In addition, the relationship with our audience in social networks grows daily; we now have more than 350,000 followers.
These facts demonstrate our commitment—one that we renew every day with our work from a newsroom that’s more diverse than ever, like our city, and with independence that’s committed to the Latinos living in New York, where we still have many battles left to win.
