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PUERTO RICO REPORT
Puerto Rico's "Old Media" Jump Into The
Internet Caravana
by Lance Oliver
March 2, 2000
Copyright © 2000 THE PUERTO RICO HERALD. All Rights Reserved.
As the number of Internet users in Puerto Rico reaches half
a million, the island's traditional media are staking out claims
in the cyber world.
This critical mass of users encouraged El Nuevo Día
to launch its web portal zonai.com.
Casiano Communications, which publishes Caribbean Business, Imagen,
and other magazines, recently unveiled a portal called PuertoRicoWow.com
(voluntary disclosure: my wife works for PuertoRicoWow). And
The San Juan Star just announced its own entry of a different
sort into the on-line business world.
These moves make sense for the print media for several reasons.
For one, though print may not be dead, as the slogan says, it's
not a major growth industry. If the internet is going to lure
readers away, newspapers must be thinking, why let them be captured
by others?
The advantage the old-line media companies have is content.
All the gee-whiz technology in the world won't keep people coming
back to an internet site if there's nothing there to interest
them.
For El Nuevo Día and its zonai portal, the wealth
of material is there for the tapping. The island's biggest newspaper
has not only the advantage of mountains of material produced daily
by its reporters, artists, photographers and contributors, plus
news and entertainment from outside sources, but also has the
advantage of technology.
While some other local media still clip stories and stuff those
scraps of paper into envelopes, El Nuevo Día has 10 years
of stories stored electronically in its computerized library.
Having that database to fall back on (through a link from zonai
to the newspaper's separate web site) means it can offer resources
to students, or researchers, in addition to providing an array
of current information.
Newer and less extensive is the web portal launched by Casiano Communications, which
publishes Caribbean Business weekly and the Que Pasa! visitors
guide, along with other magazines. It also takes existing content
and uses it to build a web portal. Most of the listings of restaurants
and events that appear on PuertoRicoWow.com are already updated
regularly by staffers for Que Pasa! Caribbean Business reporters
are now beginning to contribute news stories to the site, as well.
The portal was just launched a month ago and the company has
not yet begun selling advertising space. But that is the ultimate
goal.
Creating a web portal was a way for both El Nuevo Día
and Casiano Communications to leverage existing assets into additional
opportunities to attract "eyeballs" and thereby entice
advertisers. The primary difference between the two portals,
of course, is that zonai is in Spanish and PuertoRicoWow
is in English. In both cases, however, the audience extends beyond
the shores of Puerto Rico. Many stateside Puerto Ricans long
for more news from back home, and the internet makes it more accessible
to them than ever before. And just as tourists rely on Que Pasa!
for information, they can now get the same kind of help on-line.
Meanwhile, the San Juan Star, being one of those companies
that still stuffs newspaper clippings into folders in its library,
has less content to fall back on. So it has taken another route.
It is offering a package of internet service and a subscription
to one of its newspapers for about what other companies are charging
for internet access alone.
The Star announced recently that it will offer unlimited internet
access for $22.50 a month and that price includes a subscription
to the San Juan Star in English or the Spanish-language version,
El San Juan Star. Other companies offering internet service in
Puerto Rico typically charge between $18 to $25 per month. By
offering a subscription along with service, the Star hopes to
attract new readers to its newspapers instead of trying to cash
in by selling advertising space on a web page or portal.
So how will these ventures fare? Zonai is the only
one that's been around long enough to be judged, and it bristles
with advertisements and overflows with a variety of information.
There's truly something for just about everyone.
The "old media" companies face competition, of course,
from newcomers spawned by the internet. For Puerto Rico's newspapers,
the ultimate measure of success may be in what they avoid rather
than what they gain. The last century of Puerto Rican history
is littered with the corpses of now-forgotten newspapers, including
some that were dominant and important in their day. Today's media
companies must change with the times or they, too, will face a
slow march toward extinction.
Lance Oliver writes The Puerto Rico Report weekly
for The Puerto Rico Herald. He can be reached by email
at: loliver@caribe.net.
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