The New York Times shutters NYT en Español after three years | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times shutters NYT en Español after three years

niemanlab.org

51 pointshhs22 comments

From the title one would assume they are no longer translating their site in Spanish which of course is not the case, rather than had a site run from Mexico City that didn't prove financially viable. "Moving forward, editors will continue to translate signature journalism into more than a dozen languages — including Spanish, which will continue to appear at www.nytimes.com/es — as part of our core mission, and we will increase investment in the expansion of these broader translation efforts.

This change does not affect our coverage of Latin America, which will remain robust with dedicated staff based in Medellin, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro."

"Major US brand tries to enter well-developed foreign market, faces challenges, abandons attempt."

This happens all the time. It shouldn't be surprising that it is hard to compete with a) the already-translated version of your own paper, and b) the spanish-language print news media.

I am astonished by the comments I am reading here. One commenter suggests that Spanish newspapers are not viable because of "low literacy rates". Another assumes that newspapers in Spanish are directed to immigrants. I knew that there was a certain level of prejudice against Spanish-speakers in the USA, but I thought that the kind of people that reads this site would be better educated than that.

It's pretty wild. Though I don't know why the NYT thought they'd be competitive in the global Spanish news market. Not like there's not an already well-developed media sector in LatAm and Iberia to provide quality reporting.

I don’t think there’s a (big) market for that.

1st and 2nd gen immigrants will be integrated and comm in English like most everyone else. 0-gen will stick to community papers (Like World Journal and Epoch Times for Chinese speaking immigrants) and will avoid mainstream alternatives.

One thing the community papers provide over things like NYT in Spanish is reportage from back home. Very niche topics an NYT has neither time nor desire to cover. And even if they did immigrants would go to elpais or whatever their local favorite is. NYT cannot win that (newspaper) trade war.

Your comment appears to assume we are talking about immigrants. The article states they were trying to reach an international audience. There are many Spanish speakers around the world with no intention to immigrate to the United States.

That doesn’t make better business sense. Latin America and Iberian Europe already have great local papers obviously with local flavor and politics. The NYT wants to go in with their editorship and think they’ll do a better job? The only thing they could offer is “translate America” to a foreign audience. That’s not a whole lot.

See[1]

>"The paper expects its largest audiences for the new product to come from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Spain. There is also a sizable audience of Spanish speakers in the United States."

[1]https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/02/en-espanol-the-new-york-ti...

Yeah. One place that I read when I want to know what's up in the Spanish speaking world is El Pais from Spain, which has Latin American coverage too and an overall tone pretty similar to NYT.

I think that "international paper of record" status may be what they are going for, vs. "translate America".

I didn't say it made business sense (they admit as much in their own announcement), but that the assumption "Spanish = immigrants" is incorrect, and explicitly not what they were trying to do. We should avoid such a US centric view of the Spanish speaking world.

What is Iberian Europe?

Maybe he's trying to avoid writing "Spain"?

Well, Spain, and Portugal, with maybe Andorra and Gibraltar thrown in. Perhaps the Portuguese papers have Spanish editions?

Not that I'm aware, if you are educated enough to read a newspaper in Portuguese you can probably get the gist of the news in Spanish. It's not mutually intelligible, but it's simpler in writing.

I just remembered that the Greeks also called modern day Georgians "Iberians". Probably didn't mean to include those.

Thank you for sending me down and unexpected and thankfully not incredibly long wormhole. The loss of productivity was worth it.

The real reason was that the name hadn't been translated to proper Spanish: "Tiempos de Nueva York"

I keep reading the NYT out of a 20+ year habit but the level of editorializing, even in news that should be straightforward to report, has become so overt I can barely stand it anymore. Do I like Trump? No, not really, but living in a 2 party system there is 0 percent chance that either puppet at the top of the major parties represents even a fraction of my views.

Trump is not the literal devil but reading the NYT you would be forgiven for believing so. There is not one thing a Republican can do that is positive, and even Biden seems to be an enemy.

I guess I’ve moved on from mainstream reporting but it seems like it’s the NYT that changed rather than me.

Completely off-topic for this article, but maybe you'd like the Wall Street Journal. It's the exact same news, more or less, but the editorials are crazy in the opposite direction.

I read both. The reality is, that most mainstream news sources agree on the facts and even the analysis of news. Then they have editorials and columnists, and that's where they really differ. But you don't really know for sure unless you take in a variety of sources.

That’s true, and I think that it reflects the crisis of the papers: if they are failing to capture a wide range of audience of their own country, an aggressive expansion to a new public will not work better than with their local audience.

When the editorial line is infantilized/moved by a highly emotional discourse (the imperfect truth vs the devil) and only wants to appeal one kind of public then it is hard to empathize to a foreign general public which most probably will not be into this sort of mindset, especially in a medium which used to be a serious referent. Foreign childish public will read their local provider of childish/highly emotional news or some of the emotional mediums out there of new generation (buzzfeed magazine or YouTube or whatever pushes the emotional button of ge day).

P.S. I find disgusting to see how HN downvotes people for politely expose their opinion as it happens way too often. Downvote should stay as moderation tool not as like dislike mechanism.

Just read the Economist.

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