Nearing 40, El Mundo thinks young

Alberto Vasallo III, vice president, El Mundo | On the Hot Seat

August 21, 2011

(Matthew J. Lee/Globe Staff )

A desk nameplate reads “The Boss’’ inside Alberto Vasallo III’s renovated office at El Mundo, the state’s oldest Spanish-language weekly. With the paper’s 40th anniversary next year, Vasallo will take the helm from his father, Alberto Vasallo Jr., who founded the paper in a Cambridge basement. Over the years, the father and son team have used El Mundo to launch community events such as the annual Comcast Latino Family Festival at Fenway Park, which takes place today. The younger Vasallo recently spoke with Globe staff reporter Johnny Diaz.

How has the state’s Latino population changed in the last 40 years?

It’s a much more diverse community. You have so many different communities, from the traditional Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans who were here originally, Central and South Americans, and then my favorite segment, which is the Latino professionals. Two-thirds of Latinos in the United States were born here or came here at a very early age. That is a huge part of the community over the last five to 10 years.

What is the newspaper’s target audience?

We will continue to be the initial source for anything and everything that happens around the Latino community. We try to encompass a little bit of every one of the different communities. The newspaper is like a hodgepodge of different slices of the Latino community, although we have been actively going after more of that bilingual, younger crowd.

What is the business strategy behind community events?

I can deliver an audience not just on the readership side, on the print side, the multimedia side, but face-to-face. We have become the premiere source for face-to-face interaction with the Latino community. From a business point of view, if you’re an advertiser and you want that face-to-face interaction, I can put you in front of 10,000 people at a family event, I can put you in front of 2,000 job seekers, I can put you in front of 500 Latino professionals.

What are some of your plans for the paper?

I want the paper to continue to be very dynamic, cutting-edge. I want it to continue to be bilingual. And more than anything, I want to branch off and do more local community coverage. Let’s say, a different front page for Lawrence. I would love to see zoning.

How does your website relate to the newspaper?

The website now complements the paper, but I can see in the next five to 10 years how that would switch.

Has the state’s growing Latino presence helped in courting advertisers?

You can’t get away from the numbers. What has really helped is the infiltration of many Latino professionals in corporate America who are now strongly encouraging the corporations to outreach.

Who is your biggest competitor?