National Enquirer Studies Spanish Edition

The National Enquirer is interested in dishing the dirt for a whole new audience: the Spanish-speaking population of the United States.

On the theory that inquiring minds want to know, no matter what language they speak, the new owners of the Lantana, Fla.-based supermarket tabloid are beginning to seriously study the possibility of publishing a paper to regale Spanish speakers with the same sort of scandal, disease and amazing diets that fill 4.3 million Enquirers each week. A sister publication, Weekly World News, has a weekly circulation of about 1 million.

The Enquirer also is considering launching a soap opera publication and publishing the Enquirer internationally with a particular interest in Great Britain, where tabloid journalism is even more raucous than in the United States.

But no decision has been made yet on any of these plans, said Michael Boylan, vice chairman of the National Enquirer and one of its new owners. “We’ve been pretty busy” simply operating the company since it changed hands in early June, he said.

Latino Stories

A bidding contest for the Enquirer and Weekly World News ended in April when Macfadden Holdings and Boston Ventures Limited Partnership agreed to pay $412.5 million to the estate of Generoso Pope Jr., who built the paper into a powerhouse of gossip. New York-based Macfadden publishes romance magazines, including True Confessions and Modern Romance. Boston Ventures is a Boston investment company that bought Motown Records last year in partnership with MCA Inc. for $61 million.

A Spanish-language Enquirer would contain some stories tailored to a Latino audience, but “a good percentage (would be) what already is in the English edition,” Boylan said. This week’s edition, for example, includes such headlines as:

- JACKIE O-NO! She’s Red-Faced Over Semi-Nude Photo

- Just-Married Reba McEntire’s Secret--She’s Pregnant

- I Came Back From Vacation and Found Out I Was Dead

The company has conducted market research on the Spanish-language edition but won’t seriously pursue the idea until after Labor Day, Boylan said.

“Probably initially we would concentrate on easily defined Spanish-speaking pockets of the country,” he said. “I would be disappointed if we would decide to go ahead with it--and that decision hasn’t been made--and it wasn’t out by the end of the year or the beginning of 1990.”

Spanish Gossip Market

No name has been selected yet, he said. A Spanish edition and the possible soap opera publication would be distributed by the company’s existing distribution subsidiary, DSI Inc., Boylan said.

There is no serious national competition for the Spanish gossip market, Boylan said, although some regional publications exist.

Successful sensationalistic publications in Spanish have in the past either originated in Mexico or have gotten most of their news from Mexico, said Rafael Prieto, a Spanish-language media consultant and former newspaper editor.

Nothing quite like the Enquirer exists in Spanish, said Prieto, although there are magazines about television and soap operas, called novelas .

“Yellow journalism in Spanish is different,” said Prieto, now a free-lance writer. “It focuses more on crime and accidents and disease and people with their stomachs hanging out--not stars.”