In an effort to offer award-winning news coverage to Gilroy’s
Spanish-speaking community, The Dispatch has unveiled a new Web
site
– The Gilroy Dispatch en Espanol.
In an effort to offer award-winning news coverage to Gilroy’s Spanish-speaking community, The Dispatch has unveiled a new Web site – The Gilroy Dispatch en Espanol.
Using Google’s translational services, The Dispatch will publish its headlines online in both English and Spanish, Publisher Steve Staloch said.
“This initiative originated out of not being able to include a large part of the community in our readership,” Staloch said. “That was frustrating.”
Not only will more readers have access to news informing them about their community, but the jump to Spanish will open doors for advertisers as well, Staloch said, emphasizing that the translation occurs in real time with no delay between the posting of a story in English and its translation to Spanish.
With more than 1 million page views per month between The Dispatch and its sister newspapers – The Morgan Hill Times and The Hollister Free Lance – the addition of a Spanish Web site will be an invaluable advantage to advertisers who did not previously have a vehicle to reach the community’s Spanish-speaking population. With a significant portion of Gilroy’s largely Hispanic population speaking Spanish only, Staloch said the decision was inevitable.
Several companies, including Charter Communications and Coldwell Banker, have already realized the value of the newspaper’s Spanish-language Web site and its ability to reach Gilroy’s Spanish-speaking community, Staloch said.
Art Barron, a program coordinator with the Mexican-American Community Services Organization, said a news outlet targeting Spanish speakers in South County is long overdue.
“It’s great news,” Barron said. “There is a large part of the population that was left out because of a language barrier, and they weren’t getting the information they wanted.”
Barron said Spanish speakers would often turn to the airwaves, rather than local print media, to get their daily dose of news. After seeing a need in the community for a Spanish-language paper, Barron actually launched his own short-lived bilingual newspaper, Alternativo, and would have kept it going if he had the time and resources, he said.
“This opens up a whole other segment,” he said.
“For a newspaper to be able to communicate in multiple languages instantaneously on the Web is an amazing phenomenon,” said Dispatch Editor Mark Derry. “And we’re happy to do it. It’s a way for a segment of the community who prefer to read in their native language to keep up with what’s going on in the community.”
