The New Media

Seidy Lopez sits under a dryer, her hair in plastic rollers the size of coffee mugs, her bitsy body squeezed into a Betsey Johnson gold micro-mini and gold clingy top. A photographer, stylist and makeup artist hover around the gilded image of Latina va-va-voom in an East Los Angeles nail salon.

“The trend is gonna be gold, gold, gold,” says Christy Haubegger, gesturing toward the co-star of “Mi Vida Loca.”

The fashion photos will be featured in the February issue of Latina magazine, a bilingual lifestyle publication; Haubegger is its energetic publisher and lately, she feels as if she has struck gold. Pure oro.

Barely a year old and begun as a quarterly with more than $5 million in start-up money, Latina has newsstand sales exceeding 150,000 and 15,000 subscribers. Next summer it will go monthly, way ahead of Haubegger’s plan.

Something similar is happening at Si magazine, whose paid circulation hit 50,000 at the end of its first year. Publisher Joie Davidow will take the quarterly--which focuses on art, culture and high-profile literary Latinos--bimonthly next spring and looks to reach 75,000 in circulation in 1997.

It seems as if publishers have finally discovered the U.S. Latino population. Armed with U.S. Census Bureau statistics, marketing surveys and media studies, they’ve learned that the Latino population is the country’s fastest growing ethnic group, is projected to be the largest minority in the next decade and has a youthful (median age of 24), college-educated, burgeoning middle class.

According to marketers, Latinos also are an untapped multi-mix of people: multilingual, multicultural and a multimillion-dollar market ripe for advertisers, which, like other industries, are interested in new revenue streams. They want a piece of the $228-billion action, the estimated spending power of 27 million Latinos throughout the country.

While a handful of business- and general-interest magazines like Hispanic and Hispanic Business have been around for many years, the red-hot trend today, says Shelly Lipton, president of New York-based Latin Reports, a media analysis agency, is reaching Latino readers that mainstream publications have ignored for too long.

“If you are a Latino in this country, you are acculturating but you’re not shedding your affection for the Latino culture. And that’s what these newer magazines are about,” Lipton says.

Among the many hot new titles on newsstands:

* Urban: The Latino Magazine, aimed at inner-city twentysomethings.

* Latinos, for aficionados of politics and bicultural issues.

* Frontera, for Latinos hip on music, entertainment and attitude.

* Generation N~, for Latinos into Cuban culture.

* Moderna, que linda! LATINA Style, Estylo, all for Latinas big on fashion, fitness, relationships, sex and gender issues, finances, investments and travel.

* People en Espan~ol, for lovers of celebrities, entertainment and human interest stories.

* Newsweek en Espan~ol, for Latinos interested in U.S., international and Latin American news.

* POZ en Espan~ol, a magazine that hopes to reach the HIV community.

If you speak English or Spanish, if you’re bilingual or converse in Spanglish, Tex-Mex or Cubanese, there’s a magazine to suit your lingo, your generation, your gender--and sexual orientation--and your politics.

Publishers and media companies such as Time Inc., Essence Communications Inc. and Newsweek Inc. are responding because Latinos are tired of being largely excluded from mainstream publications.

And advertisers--Revlon, American Express, the Gap, Nordstrom, General Motors, JCPenney, Gillette, Colgate, Philip Morris, Bulova, banks, insurance companies and health care providers--are reacting positively, according to most editors and publishers.

Put it all together and you’ve got a formula for success, says Jack Feur, columnist and West Coast bureau chief of Inside Media, a media-buying publication for magazines, newspapers, movie studios and ad agencies.

“Those of us in Hispanic marketing for the last decade have been saying, ‘This is coming and you should be ready,’ ” Feur says.

Haubegger and other editors say they started their publications because most Latinos don’t relate to mainstream magazines.

“You don’t see our faces in fashion layouts or in stories and ads in the mainstream publications,” Haubegger says. She recalls a fashion spread in Vogue last spring that was disturbing to her and her staff. Standing near a tall, thin model in a designer dress was an elderly, overweight Mexican woman. “It made me cry. She was being used as a prop, not as a human being.”

Haubegger says her readers--upwardly mobile, college-educated Latinas in their 20s and 30s--want stories that showcase Latinas as role models. “They want to be successful businesswomen, but they also want to know how to make low-fat enchiladas.”

Linda Peebles, co-publisher and advertising director of Marina del Rey-based que linda! (how pretty!) says her readers “don’t define beauty as a 6-foot-tall, blond, blue-eyed woman with no hips. For us, beauty is having dark hair and dark eyes.”

Peebles, who started que linda! three years ago--and has since turned down a $2.5-million offer to sell--says her quarterly magazine has evolved along with circulation, which has doubled in the last two years and is at 60,000.

It now features a car column called Tu Carro because Latinas wanted it. And subjects such as feminism, adultery and sexual harassment--issues that family members and even Latinas themselves, have kept hush-hush--have been featured; stories on masturbation and homosexuality are in the works.

Christine Granados, editor of Moderna in Austin, Texas, targets 18- to 44-year-old college-educated Latinas. She says her magazine doesn’t have a social agenda--intentionally. “We want our readers to have fun. We are not here to preach to them,” she says of the quarterly publication with a 150,000 newsstand distribution.

Davidow, of Si, known in the industry as the Vanity Fair for Latinos, says her readers are interested in stories about maintaining a dual culture. “Everything we write about is, ‘How do we manage this thing of assimilating without giving up your culture?’ ”

With a year of issues under her belt, she says advertisers--Donna Karan, Estee Lauder, Carolina Herrera, Germaine Monteil, Toyota, Honda, Nissan--are realizing that “there is an affluent, middle-class, college-educated and inquisitive Latino population that has to be reached on their own turf.”

Luis Valdich, executive vice president for Newsweek en Espan~ol, agrees. He says that because of the sheer size of the Latino population as well as its diversity, officials gave the thumbs up to publish a Spanish counterpart six months ago.

“There was a need to fill with the consumers who wanted international news, especially from Latin America, in Spanish,” he says. Today, about 15% of the Spanish-language Newsweek’s editorial content is generated specifically for Latino readers.

The people at People en Espan~ol also hope to fill a void with Spanish-language readers with the launch of its quarterly publication last month, says associate editor Cynthia Sanz.

Sanz says focus groups strongly indicated a Spanish version of People is what readers wanted.

“If you give this market something that they are genuinely interested in, they are going to buy it,” says Betty Cortina, also an associate editor. “There is a myth in the publishing world that you can’t make money in the Latino community. Selena broke that myth,” she says about the success of last year’s tribute to the murdered Tejano singing star. The Selena issue sold nearly 1 million copies, which quickly got editors’ attention.

Jeremy Koch, People magazine vice president, says $5 million to $10 million will be invested in the Spanish version. He has guaranteed advertisers (AT&T;, Calvin Klein, Columbia House Records, HBO, Citizen Watch, Ford Motor Co., Mitsubishi Motors and Sears, Roebuck & Co., among others) a 170,000 paid circulation (all newsstand sales) through 1997.

“We expect to make it,” he says, adding that part of the magazine’s five-year plan is to reach a 500,000 circulation and go beyond being a quarterly.

POZ en Espan~ol also plans to capture Spanish-language readers when it kicks off in April. Backed by the publishers of POZ, an English-language magazine for and about people with HIV and the treatment of AIDS, the free Spanish version will focus on educating Latinos about AIDS and access to health care, says editor Gonzalo Aburto.

Sean Strub, founder and executive editor of the English-language POZ, says he’s been wanting to do a Spanish version for years but didn’t have the financing until now.

Yvette Doss, editor and co-publisher of Frontera--a quarterly for young adults about music, culture and politics that has a 20,000 circulation--sums up the sentiments of many Latino newcomers to publishing, an arena that clearly welcomes competition:

“You can’t create one Latino magazine and expect all Latinos to buy it because as Latinos we have different sensibilities.” So Doss and her co-publisher, Martin Albornoz, made a magazine of their own. “We thought if we made it, people would come.”

And they have.

But how long will this trend continue? And which magazines will survive?

“The jury is still out,” says Lipton of Latin Reports. “Latino magazines are filling a void that television and radio can’t cater to. Believe me, I’ve asked myself, ‘Is the Latino market going to reach a point when it will cool off?’ I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon, not if you look at the demographics.”

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Magazines With a Latino Flavor

Here’s a sampling, in alphabetical order, of magazines aimed at Latino readers.

Estylo

(Projected launch is January 1997)

Language: English.

Content: Beauty, fashion, entertainment and relationships.

Price: $2.50 cover price; $9.95 for six issues.

Headquarters: Los Angeles; (213) 383-6300.

*

Frontera

Language: English peppered with Spanglish.

Content: Music, entertainment, culture and politics.

Price: $12 for six issues.

Headquarters: Los Angeles; (888) 376-8729.

*

Generation N~

Language: English.

Content: Culture, music with Cuban American flair.

Price: $24 for 12 issues.

Headquarters: Miami Beach, Fla.; (305) 576-9061.

*

Latina

Language: Bilingual.

Content: Lifestyle issues, fitness, fashion, celebrities.

Price: $2.50 cover price; $7.95 for four issues. Goes monthly in June 1997.

Headquarters: New York City; (800) 274-1521.

*

LATINA Style

Language: English.

Content: Business, financial and professional issues.

Price: $20 for a two-year subscription of 10 issues.

Headquarters: Washington, D.C.; (800) 651-8083.

*

Latinos

Language: English.

Content: General interest with a political emphasis.

Price: $2.75 cover price; $10 for six issues.

Headquarters: San Diego; (619) 497-0363.

*

Moderna

Language: English with some bilingual articles.

Content: Beauty, health, fashion, travel, celebrities.

Price: $1.95 cover price; $12 for two-year subscription.

Headquarters: Austin, Texas; (512) 476-5599.

*

Newsweek en Espan~ol

Language: Spanish.

Content: Newsweek’s Spanish language edition.

Price: $2.95 cover price, $195 for a 52-week subscription.

Headquarters: Miami, Fla.; fax: (305) 371-9392.

*

People en Espan~ol

Language: Spanish.

Content: People magazine’s Spanish edition.

Price: $1.99 cover price, four issues planned for 1997, no subscriptions.

Headquarters: New York City; (212) 522-9905.

*

POZ en Espan~ol

(Launch date is April 1997)

Language: Spanish.

Content: Health, politics, lifestyle issues for / about people with AIDS.

Price: Free.

Headquarters: New York City; (800) 883-2163.

*

que linda!

Language: English.

Content: Lifestyle, fitness, fashion, culture, personalities and social issues.

Price: $2.50 cover price; $8.95 for a quarterly subscription.

Headquarters: Marina del Rey; (310) 397-8070.

*

Si

Language: English.

Content: Fiction, public issues, art, culture and entertainment.

Price: $2.95 cover price; $8.95 for four issues. Starting in March 1997, Si will go bimonthly.

Headquarters: Los Angeles; (213) 975-9313.

*

Urban: The Latino Magazine

Language: Some articles in Spanish.

Content: Music, independent films, inner-city life, politics/social issues.

Price: $2 cover price; $12 for six issues.

Headquarters: Long Island City, N.Y.; (212) 780-3316.