From coverage of the Great Depression to the Bay of Pigs
fiasco in Cuba, from the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, El
Diario/La Prensa (1913– ) has provided Spanish-speaking readers in New York with news and analysis of critical world events. The oldest Spanish-language newspaper
in New York, El Diario/La Prensa continues to offer a
different perspective on the news. Its editors admit the
newspaper slants its coverage in favor of Latinos and Hispanics, who make up one-fourth of the city’s eight million
residents. And New York’s opinion leaders and politicians
take notice. “El Diario is one of the primary ways that
the Latino community finds out what’s going on in the
world,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told CBS-2
TV in June 2003 for a special report on the newspaper’s
ninetieth anniversary.
Founded as a weekly in 1913 by Rafael Viera, La Prensa
became a daily newspaper in 1918. On its ninth anniversary as a daily, La Prensa wrote that it wants to be a mirror
for the Hispanic community as well as a source of news
about readers’ native countries. In 1963, it merged with El
Diario, which had been started in the 1950s to serve the
growing population of immigrants from the Caribbean.
The newspaper was widely appreciated for its “human relations department,” which helped the new immigrants get
help in education, health and social services. Among the
celebrities to be interviewed in the El Diario/La Prensa’s
pages were the actresses Dolores del Rìo, Mario Moreno
“Cantinflas,” and Marìa Fèlix. The newspaper closely followed the singing career of Guadalupe Victoria Yoli Raymond, better known as “La Lupe.” A former editor, Manuel
de Dios Unanue, was gunned down in a New York restaurant in 1992 by a member of a Colombian drug cartel who
was later convicted. Unanue had published a book about
the inner workings of the Medellin Cartel in 1988.
The circulation of El Diario/La Prensa is about fifty
thousand, just edging its chief rival newspaper, Hoy, with
which it has been locked in a tight battle for circulation
since Hoy’s founding in 1998. Hoy was found to have
inflated its circulation figures by 46 percent in 2003. The
National Association of Hispanic Publications routinely
names El Diario/La Prensa as one of the best Hispanic
daily newspapers. El Diario/La Prensa is owned by ImpreMedia LLC, which was formed in 2004 and also owns La
Opinion of Los Angeles and La Raza in Chicago. In 2006,
El Diario/La Prensa had about fifty journalists in the newsroom, and they were supplemented with freelancers as well
as correspondents based in Latin America. El Diario/La
Prensa made its own news in its ninetieth anniversary year
when its top editor, Gerson Borrero, resigned that position
but stayed as a columnist to protest the newspaper owners’
decision not to publish a column by Cuban President Fidel
Castro. The newspaper owners later apologized for killing
the column. “Mistakes must be admitted so we can learn
from them,” said a letter to readers signed by Publisher
Rossana Rosado along with Douglas Knight and John Paton
of the Canadian company Knight Paton Media, one of the
investors in ImpreMedia.