Brian Wiles, Co-Owner of Cincinnati-based TSJnews, calls Pittsburgh the “last great American city that has not been Latino-ized.” His awareness of the city’s often-overlooked Latino community is the reason he started the metropolitan region’s first-ever Spanish-language newspaper–the monthly La Jornada Latina–two months ago. Although that publishing event was not generally noticed at the time, it has been gaining more attention, perhaps from the sudden discovery of something overlooked.
In any case, the venture’s small start–with a local editorial staff of one full-time writer, Alejandra Quezada-Crowder, and a circulation of 5,000 monthly issues from 150 distribution points–appears to be moving forward with a benefit of serious advance research and a bellwether recognition that the Pittsburgh regional labor market will depend on increased immigration in the years ahead, and some important part of that growth is certain to be provided by Latinos.
That promising trend is one that Wiles already perceives within the educational and income demographics of Pittsburgh’s Spanish-speakers, whom he characterizes as “high-end and professionally-oriented” with strong connections to the region’s robust health-care and higher-education institutions.
Wiles, who grew up in Bethel Park, plans to develop a market for Latino media in cities south of the Great Lakes, and already encompasses Spanish-language newspapers in Dayton, Columbus, and Detroit.
“The region is really untapped from an Hispanic media standpoint, and as we started getting into this community, we realized there was a big disconnect–not unlike what we saw when we created our first paper in Cincinnati in 1999,” he says.
That disconnect, Wiles says, can be seen among Latinos who live in the towns of metropolitan Pittsburgh–Washington, Monroeville, Mt. Lebanon, Butler, Robinson Township, Bethel Park, Carnegie, and Oakland–“who don’t really know there are other Hispanics in the region if they didn’t see them in the bookstore or the coffee shop,” Wiles says. “With this perspective, we realized that there is a small but very real and emerging Hispanic opportunity in Pittsburgh.”
Source: La Jornada Latina, Brian Wiles
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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