US Spanish language radio start-ups pursue growing Latino clout

Hours before he was arraigned on criminal charges at a Miami courthouse this week, Donald Trump phoned in to a South Florida radio station to give an exclusive interview.

Host Carines Moncada questioned the former US president in English. Then, with a colleague, she translated the interview into Spanish for listeners tuning in to Radio Libre 790.

Moncada likened Latin America’s “persecution of the political conservative opposition” to what she said “is happening here in the US”. Trump agreed, praising the host for her “nice” and “incredible” questions.

The talk show runs on Americano Media, a broadcaster that calls itself the country’s first Spanish-language conservative media group. Americano’s programming will soon reach 50 markets across the US.

The Florida-based network, founded by former telecoms executive Iván García-Hidalgo, launched last year just as a rightward shift among Latino voters carried into the 2022 congressional midterm elections. 

Americano Media has raised $20mn from private investors, executives said, and expects to bring in another $50mn in its next equity round. A recent deal with iHeartRadio, the US’s largest radio station owner, has given it national digital distribution.

“Many Hispanic conservatives get their news and opinion on talk radio, yet there’s no national media platform serving that audience,” said García-Hidalgo, who also serves as Americano Media’s chief executive.

Americano Media is not the only newcomer tapping into the Spanish-language radio market. Last summer Jess Morales Rocketto and Stephanie Valencia, former staffers to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, founded Latino Media Network and raised $80mn — a historic figure for a Hispanic-owned US media start-up. 

LMN has purchased 18 radio stations from TelevisaUnivision and started operations in the Río Grande Valley of Texas, where Trump made significant gains among Latino voters in the 2020 presidential election. It now reaches eight of the country’s top-10 media markets.

For generations, Spanish-language media in the US was dominated by Telemundo, now owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal, and Univision, which in early 2022 merged with Mexican entertainment giant Televisa to become TelevisaUnivision.

Although TelevisaUnivision and Telemundo also own radio assets, the arrival of LMN and Americano brings new competition to market for radio in Spanish.

Radio is immensely popular among US Latinos. According to Nielsen, broadcast radio leads all other platforms in reaching Latino audiences on a monthly basis. In 2022, 97 per cent of US Latinos tuned in to radio each month, compared to 92 per cent of the general population. From 2017 to 2022, live TV viewership declined 13 per cent among Latinos to 84 per cent.

Spanish is also the US’s most common non-English language, spoken by nearly 50mn people in the country — 12 times greater than the next four most common languages, according to Census Bureau data.

“There are new opportunities for Spanish-language radio start-ups,” said Stacie de Armas, senior vice-president of diverse insights at Nielsen. “There are new voices . . . and perspectives that haven’t surfaced before.”

Jessica Retis, a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, said, “we are in a new transformation of the Latino media landscape” and its new players reflect Latinos’ growing economic, social and cultural mobility.

That gives new entrants to the Spanish-language media market a chance to become influential voices for one of the country’s fastest-growing populations — and important conduits for candidates chasing the Latino vote.

“To get this vote you want to speak to [Latinos] in a culturally appropriate manner. And that means Spanish language,” said Steve Haro, executive vice-president of government affairs at TelevisaUnivision, the largest of the Spanish-language media incumbents.

Latino voters’ share of the electorate has doubled since 2000 to 14.3 per cent, and while they tend to favour Democrats, a 2020 report from data group Catalist found an 8-percentage-point increase in their support for Republicans since 2016, with a 14-point swing in Florida.

García-Hidalgo is behind Americano Media’s efforts to capitalise on this shift and fill what he calls a conservative “void” in Latino media. In addition to Trump, Americano Media has already secured interviews with Republican politicians such as senator Marco Rubio.

“Our syndication model broadcasts our hosts into the most important markets in vital battleground states. This immediately positions us well for brand and political campaign advertising revenues in the next several quarters,” García-Hidalgo said. He said his ambition is to make Americano Media “Fox News in Spanish”.

That ambition is “silly” to Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist. He said that a push for a Spanish-language conservative media company was “far more symbolic than substantive”, given that Spanish is declining as the dominant tongue among audiences who are moving to the right.

Last year, Latino Media Network acquired Radio Mambí, a Miami station long associated with conservative programming. The purchase drew backlash from critics who claimed the takeover signalled a leftwing attempt to consolidate control of the media. Lourdes Ubieta, a former host, quit Radio Mambí, describing the deal as “a stab in the heart” of her community. She now presents a show on Americano.

Despite their Democratic backgrounds, LMN’s founders have a less singular focus on political news than Americano Media and have emphasised that its broadcasts will go beyond politics to include sports talk as well as programming around immigration, healthcare and personal finance.

LMN claims to have a non-partisan mission and boasts a wide-ranging set of advisers, from actress Eva Longoria, who has endorsed Democrats, to Al Cárdenas, who was an appointee of former president Ronald Reagan, a Republican. 

To Luis Ubiñas, an investor in LMN and a former Ford Foundation president, the media sector is only starting to catch up to the economic growth of this population. “The media insists on making Latinos invisible. Latino Media Network is a tiny step towards rectifying a broad problem.”