You may recall the post “Media Covering Media” two weeks ago, where I commented on the growing phenomenon of the journalism industry covering itself.  While I was already planning on going back to the article and expanding it in this week’s post, you can only imagine my degree of surprise when I went on MLN today and noticed they were featuring an article on minority news.

The article is entitled “New England’s 7th Spanish-language Paper Begins Publishing,” and tells the story of the newly-launched “El Tiempo de Boston” (note: sorry no link. it doesn’t seem to have a website yet).    The original story was taken by MLN from none other than the largest cirulating paper in the Boston area, The Boston Globe. That makes this story quite interesting for a number of reasons:

- El Tiempo’s story was deemed newsworthy by an established newspaper in the area

- a minority news outlet deemed the story about a new minority news outlet newsworthy

- the story is now available to other publications through Boston’s AP (i.e. Charleston Daily Mail of West Virginia)

How the story came to be is not the only interesting thing here. There’s a plenitude of issues relevant to our minority news class that arise in the story itself:

- what does the birth of another minority news outlet mean to the area? (in reference to both minority and mainstream media)

- why did the creators feel the need to create it?

- who will the publication cater to? Or seek to cater to? (and how: ads? stories? circulation?)

-how will they survive in such a competitive market and in such harsh economic times?

If you’ve gotten this far in the post, then you’ll see there are more questions than answers here. In order to begin rectifying that, let us first tackle the fundamental question at stake here: why would the media be interested in covering itself?

From personal experience I can say print media does not typically encourage stories where the primary actor is another media outlet. But at the same time, I know that if something were to set off the “story alarm” in my head, my editors would be open to hearing about it. Below are a few things, which would set off any journalist’s alarm:

• if the story’s premise points to a greater trend (like last week’s Latino In America story)
• if there are big players at stake (such as the Times acquisition of the Globe)
• if something is without precedent (much like the Singapore case in “Community Media”)
• if something quickly becomes part of the popular culture (the dozens of stories covering Kanye’s VMA scene)
• minority news only: if another media outlet deems something newsworthy and it’s relevant to your audience (the MLN story above)

As for answers to the questions raised in the article itself, one thing is certain those who created the newspaper felt their community needed more exposure as well as diversity within that exposure. The article mentions that the owner seeks to cater to the Latino community of Boston and thus far has run articles concerning Latinos in the area both directly and indirectly. But, the most interesting part of his selection of stories as opposed to those run in other Spanish papers is that his paper actually covers crime stories, something not typically seen in other minority media overall. So far, the paper plans to depend on ad sales alone to keep it running and they hope to keep it free with a circulation of 20,000. What the Boston community’s, and specifically its Latino community, response is to this new media addition is not yet visible.