The Return Of The News

After a nearly five-year hiatus, Mexico City’s English language daily – The News – began publishing again on October 18. The paper, which for half a century had served the expatriate community in Mexico and had also built up a certain readership among Spanish speakers, had ceased publishing in 2003 when its sister publication Novedades shut down.

The void had been filled for several years by the local edition of the Miami Herald, in partnership with Mexico’s El Universal, but that stopped publishing earlier this year.

The new News has many of the traits of its forerunner — a mixture of international and domestic news, local and international business news, sports with an emphasis on the U.S. , leisure, lifestyle and local community sections, even a small classified section — and the publisher is a member of Mexico’s O’Farrill family which for years produced The News and Novedades. This explains why the paper says it’s in its 58th year.

Even some of the columnists and contributors to the opinion pages are “veterans” whose connections with the paper go back decades. On those pages, a fair amount has been said in the first 10 days about the newspaper industry in general, how it’s been suffering from the increased use of Internet and other electronic media, and about the philosophy of the need or desire for an English-language newspaper in Mexico in this day and age. The implicit question in those comments was, perhaps, will The News survive this time around? That question will be answered in the next few years, but my reply is I hope so.

An anecdote, then. The day I heard The News had relaunched, I went to the newsstand on the corner of the Angel of the Independence monument – a business and tourist area – and asked them if they had it. The voceador – or newspaper vendor – looked at me as if I’d been on another planet for the past five years and hadn’t heard. So I quickly explained that it had been relaunched. Well, he hadn’t yet heard about that, but said of the absent paper: “it’s their loss, that one used to sell well.”

The News has since appeared on newsstands, and subscriptions are available at subscriptions@thenews.com.mx or by phone at 5639 2424.