Last Local News Source in Spanish Stops Presses : Media: With El Eco del Valle’s demise, experts wonder if the area can support such a paper.

The demise of El Eco del Valle, which published its final edition Thursday, leaves the San Fernando Valley without a Spanish-language newspaper devoted to local news for the first time in more than a decade.

El Eco’s chief competitor, the weekly El Universal, distributes mostly in the Valley but has no reporters based here and does not emphasize Valley news, preferring international, national and regional coverage.

This has led publishers and media analysts to ask whether the Valley, which according to the 1990 census has 461,000 Latinos out of a total population of 1.5 million, can support a Spanish-language publication primarily devoted to local news.

Media analysts said the Spanish-language advertising market is large enough to sustain a local newspaper, but they predict that it will take time to develop the right balance of readers and advertisers to make a publication profitable. Others question whether Spanish-language readers are even interested in local news and would instead rather read about their home countries. Media analysts estimate the potential market of Spanish readers in the Valley at 200,000 to 250,000, most of whom are assumed to be recent immigrants.

The weekly El Eco, circulation 63,000, emphasized the local, carrying a mix of news from San Fernando, Sylmar and Pacoima, which are heavily Latino. Some stories, such as a ban on gangs in a San Fernando park, were covered by media throughout Los Angeles; others, such as a groundbreaking, would be ignored by larger publications.

El Eco’s publisher maintains that the paper eventually would have succeeded but could not remain solvent in the current recession. The newspaper, distributed free of charge to businesses and residences, relied entirely on advertising revenues and never made a profit, said Publisher Monica Lozano.

“In terms of readership, we had a lot of support,” Lozano said. “The company just could not continue to take those losses.”

In its five years of existence, El Eco lost more than $1.5 million and probably would have lost several hundred thousand dollars more if it continued operations in 1992, she said. El Eco’s owner, Lozano Enterprises, also publishes the Spanish-language daily La Opinion, based in Los Angeles. Lozano Enterprises is half-owned by members of the Lozano family and half-owned by Times Mirror Co., parent company of the Los Angeles Times.

El Eco is the most recent in a series of Spanish-language weekly newspapers to cease publication in the Valley since 1988. The oldest, El Sol in San Fernando, whose circulation had risen to 27,000, folded in 1989 after eight years of publication. Two others, El Dia and La Voz, lasted only a few months each in 1988.

Thelma Barrios, editor and publisher of The Sun, San Fernando-based parent publication of the defunct El Sol, said the papers folded partly because they were all competing for a limited advertising base. The Sun, an English-language weekly tabloid with a circulation of 15,500, launched El Sol first as an insert, then as a separate publication.

She would not elaborate on why her company, Mission Independent Newspapers Inc., stopped publishing El Sol.

“It was a frustrating situation that just wasn’t worth the effort,” she said. Barrios still believes a local Spanish paper can survive in the Valley, although it was not a winning proposition for The Sun.

But some media experts say Spanish publications fare better with a regional, if not international, approach.

Henry E. Adams, executive vice president of Market Development Inc., a San Diego research firm that specializes in Latino marketing, said most Latinos interested in local affairs probably would prefer to read about them in English.

“If you follow local news, you’re probably a registered voter, a longtime resident and you probably have some fluency in English--therefore you can then get that news from English-language media,” Adams said. “The correlate is that the more Spanish-dependent the group, the more their interest will be focused back home.”

El Universal was founded in 1990 by Joseph L. Arbona, who said at the time that he left his job as publisher of El Eco because he thought Spanish speakers wanted a mix of international and local news. Arbona has since left El Universal and was unavailable for comment.

That philosophy is still reflected in Torrance-based El Universal, said Publisher Edward Estrada, who oversees five reporters in the Los Angeles area and three correspondents in Latin America.

“We’re not a local newspaper,” he said. “We do report on Valley and Los Angeles information, but we ran stories on the Gulf War, the Clarence Thomas hearings and free-trade negotiations with Mexico too.”

El Universal distributes 45,000 copies in the Valley and another 5,000 copies in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, said Circulation Director Etzael Navarro. About 5,000 copies also are distributed in the southeast corner of Los Angeles County, in communities such as Huntington Park and Bell Gardens.

Navarro said El Universal may expand in El Eco’s absence.

“We’re hoping to double our size and our circulation and maybe even go to twice a week,” Navarro said. But he quickly added, “We can’t do all that right away--the recession hurts us too.”

Lozano and El Eco Editor Carlos Ruvalcaba defended their emphasis on local news, saying their studies indicated that nearly all copies were picked up each week.

They said the principal problem was their inability to translate El Eco’s readership popularity into advertising dollars. The paper never developed a profitable advertising base and lost some clients in the recession.

Most Spanish newspapers, including El Eco, survive almost totally on advertising from smaller local or regional firms.

“The recession has hurt everyone. No matter how strong our readership is, we’re dependent on the strength of our local retailers,” said Tino Duran, president of the National Assn. of Hispanic Publications and publisher of two Spanish-language weeklies in Texas.

Duran, Lozano and others in the industry complain that national advertisers shun Spanish-language print media.

“They just don’t notice us,” said Robert Soto, director of Burbank-based Hispanic Media Associates, an advertising sales firm for a consortium of about 85 Spanish-language publications.

Most national advertisers prefer to reach Latinos through broadcast media, according to Hispanic Business magazine. Its December issue reports that out of $733.5 million spent on marketing to Latinos, only $106.9 million was spent on print while $556.2 million was spent on radio and television. The rest was spent on billboards and other forms of advertising.

Ironically, some of the problems faced by El Eco came not from outside competitors but possibly from La Opinion, circulation 107,000, which is more attractive to big advertisers because of its broader base of readers, Lozano said.

By December, the Lozanos decided the paper simply had to fold.

“If the recession had not hurt so many of our advertisers we would have had our first profitable month in November,” she said. Instead, November--normally the best month for advertising in newspapers--was a disaster, said Lozano, who would not release any numbers.

In its 28-page final issue, El Eco went out with both a gesture of sadness and flamboyance.

The single front-page headline read “ Las golondrinas vuelan en invierno “ (“The swallows fly away in the winter”), a play on the title of the traditional Mexican song of farewell--an equivalent to “Auld Lang Syne” in English.