CALÓ NEWS has delivered you news and opinion pieces by and about the diverse California Latino/a/x/ community for the last 25 weeks.
To mark this anniversary, we are announcing the official launch of our website at https://calo.org/
You will soon see daily updates to our website and you still will read our top stories delivered to your inbox in a newsletter format every week.
We celebrated our launch at the Latino Media Summit held Thursday at the Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Los Angeles.
At the event journalists, policy makers and philanthropists gathered to call for more inclusion of our diverse community in the mainstream news media and also for increased support of ethnic, independent and nonprofit media.
“Our Latino media has historically played a critical role in strengthening society by bringing awareness to the issues that matter most in our lives – an economy that works for all, a healthcare system that provides adequate and affordable coverage, an education system that responds to our needs, safe and clean neighborhoods, access to capital to start our own businesses and buy a home,” said Monica Lozano, the former publisher and CEO of La Opinión, who spoke at the summit.
One of the challenges is the underrepresentation of Latinos working in the news media.
Latinos represent just 7% of newspaper employees, according to the 2018 American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) Newsroom Employment Diversity Survey completed with the University of Virginia Department of Media Studies. Latinos represent just 5% of radio and 10.9% of television employees, according to a 2020 study by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate. They released a study that found Latinos made up an estimated 12% of the media industry workforce. But Latinos are an estimated 18% of workers in the rest of the workforce. Latinos also made up an estimated 8% of the newspaper, periodical, book and directory publishers’ workforce and 11% of news analysts, reporters and journalists were Latino, the GAO study found.
In California alone, there are more than 300 ethnic media outlets serving at least 38 different ethnic, racial, and cultural communities in 36 languages, according to a report commissioned by the Latino Media Collaborative.
Of the ethnic media outlets surveyed, 73% are locally and independently owned and 65% of the outlets have fewer than 5 full-time staff, while 22% have only one full-time staff.
CALÓ NEWS is a product of The Latino Media Collaborative (LMC), which also partners with ethnic and nonprofit media outlets to support journalism. At the summit, the LMC awarded grants to ethnic media outlets to report on anti-hate stories and we also are covering the rise in hate crimes at CALÓ NEWS.
“As I hear of other ethnic communities and regions partnering with philanthropy to develop diverse solutions to build robust and thriving regional media ecosystem that value everything from our hyperlocal news, to digital, to our essential broadcast partners, it is crystal clear to me that Latinos must step up to lead in this moment,” said Arturo Carmona, the head of the Latino Media Collaborative and founder of CALÓ NEWS.
Our stories are not just Latino stories but they are American stories. It’s also vital that we cover all the issues that Latinos care about, not just immigration but politics, housing, education, health and more.
“This is our time,” said Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez, who voiced her support for Latino representation in the media at the summit. “This is why it’s so important for Latino voices to be heard.”