What to do?

[Roy Lawrence]

I'm not campaigning for or against Spanish
programming. All I'm saying is that it is appearing on
more frequencies around the dial and will continue to,
including Boston, like it or not. I am just looking at
what's going on around the country. I do not and will
not *solely* live by numbers alone. Besides, the
income would be what drives the format or do you
believe these people have no major disposable income?

Roy Lawrence
San Francisco, CA

 
--- Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

> <<On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:18:52 -0800 (PST), Roy
> Lawrence <lawrencemedia@yahoo.com> said:
> 
> > There is no doubt someone will make a fortune with
> > Spanish programming. Guess we wait and see who is
> > going to fold first.
> 
> WARNING: infodump ahead... 
> 
> I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone (other
> than the brokered
> operators currently in the business) to "make a
> fortune with Spanish
> programming", in Massachusetts, despite the sizable
> Spanish-speaking
> community.  Here are the top ten languages for the
> Boston-Worcester-Lawrence CMSA, which includes the
> entire area of the
> Boston-Worcester radio market, as tabulated by the
> 2000 Census (in the
> category "language spoken at home"):
> 
> English		4,450,031 (81.7%)
> Spanish		  312,861 ( 5.7%) (about half the national
> average)
> Portuguese	  120,090 ( 2.2%)
> French		   93,367 ( 1.7%)
> Chinese		   70,537 ( 1.3%)
> Italian		   55,202 ( 1.0%)
> French creole	   43,373 ( 0.8%)
> Vietnamese	   29,264 ( 0.5%)
> Greek		   29,216 ( 0.5%)
> Russian		   27,636 ( 0.5%)
> 
> Looked at another way: only about a third of
> non-English-speakers are
> Spanish speakers.  Given the existence of several
> stations already in
> the market which program mostly or entirely in
> Spanish, it's hard to
> imagine any format which would be sufficiently
> lucrative based simply
> on the Spanish-speaking audience to justify an FM. 
> This is not to say
> that an FM format could not be built around a
> Spanish-speaking
> audience -- but it would also need to appeal to the
> other 94.3% of the
> population to have much hope of success.
> 
> By comparison, the Washington-Baltimore CMSA has
> 469,343
> Spanish-speakers (about 6.6%) and no other language
> has more than
> 70,000 native speakers.  Other comparisons: Hartford
> is 8.5%
> Spanish-speaking, with the next few being Polish
> (2.1%), French
> (1.8%), and Italian (1.5%). 
> Philadelphia-Wilmington-South Jersey is
> more English (the largest ethnic group there is
> African-American); the
> numbers are Spanish 5.2%, Italian 0.9%, Chinese
> 0.7%.  Providence is
> 7.3% Spanish and 6.0% Portuguese; surprisingly,
> French (2.1%) outpulls
> Italian (1.1%) there.  Springfield is close to the
> national average at
> 10.8% Spanish-speakin, with runners-up being Polish
> (1.7%), French
> (1.7%), and Portuguese (1.1%).
> 
> Smaller New England cities tend to be more
> monolingual; Pittsfield,
> Portland, and Burlington are all over 90%
> English-speaking, with the
> largest minority language in Pittsfield being
> Spanish (1.5%) and in
> the other two French (2.2% and 3.1%).
> 
> -GAWollman
> 
> 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com