Latino Immigrants Quickly Lose Spanish-Media Habit

A new survey of the media habits of Hispanic Americans has both bad news and good news for the many newspapers now jumping into Spanish-language publication.

On the one hand, the rapid growth of these papers depends on a correspondingly high and continuing rate of immigration because, the survey finds, the longer Latinos are in the U.S., the less they depend on Spanish alone to get their news. Of Latinos in the U.S. for 12 or fewer years, 46% get all their news in Spanish. For those in the country for 13 to 24 years, the rate falls to 31%.

"One bottom-line finding here is that only half of the foreign-born (Latino) population get their news only in Spanish. It's a clear indication here that the size of the market for Spanish-language news is very much dependent on ongoing immigration flows. That's the replenishment for this market," said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, which released the survey this morning.

On the other hand, there are other factors suggesting the appetite for news in Spanish remains even as English-language fluency grows. The Latino population turns out to be heavily bilingual when it comes to getting the news, with the percentage of those receiving the news both in Spanish and English far bigger than those who read or listen to news only in Spanish or English. The Pew Hispanic Center survey found that 44% of Latino adults get their news in both languages, while 31% follow the news only in English and 24% only in Spanish.

Suro noted in a news briefing on the results that 43% of second-generation Latinos read and listen to the news in both languages. "Most of that second-generation is still in childhood," Suro said. "The question is whether Spanish will continue to exercise some hold over the second-generation as it moves into adulthood."

In the newspaper category, English dominates, the survey found. "The share of Latino newspaper readers that gets news only from publications in English is three times larger (62%) than the share reading Spanish-language papers (21%)," the survey stated. "By a wide margin Latinos who get all their news in English give higher ratings to newspapers for being the most informative medium (16%) compared to Latinos who get all their news in Spanish (3%) and for giving greater service to Hispanics (15% vs. 1%)."

Exposure to English-language news media influences the views of foreign-born Latinos on a number of topics, the survey found. Compared to immigrants who get their news in Spanish, they have less favorable views of undocumented immigrants, are more skeptical of Bush administration policies in Iraq and are less trusting of news organizations. English-only news consumers tend to say that media coverage of Hispanics overemphasizes illegal immigration, drug trafficking and gang crime.

Newspapers rank third in the media preferences of Latinos. Asked by Pew which media they get any news from on an average weekday, 88% said network television, 82% local television, 52% newspapers, 58% radio and 29% the Internet.

Still, the survey suggests Latinos are happy with the new emphasis on Spanish-language news delivery. Fully 78% of all surveyed Latinos said the Spanish-language news media "are very important to the economic and political development of the Hispanic population," according to Pew.

"This number even includes Latinos who do not read or listen to Spanish-language media," Suro said. "It clearly has a very powerful symbolic value beyond its market share. So advertising in Spanish-language media might actually have some carry-over effect. It's a way of showing the significance of this community and signal some respect for the community."

The survey was conducted among 1,316 Latinos from Feb. 11 to March 11, and claims a margin of error of +/-3.4%. The Pew Hispanic Center is a project of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and is supported by the Pew Charitable Trust. The survey was supported with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.