¿Qué pasa with American News Media? How Digital-Native Latinx News Serves Community Information Needs Using Messaging Apps

Abstract

Traditional and legacy Spanish-language news outlets are shrinking, leaving many communities in the U.S. without news that satisfies their critical information needs. At the same time, news media entrepreneurs are adopting and adapting to technological changes that offer new venues for news delivery. We use a mixed-methods research approach to analyze Latinx digital-native news media organizations that distribute news in Spanish via mobile instant messaging (MIM) apps. Results show that journalists took a bottom-up approach to meeting the information needs of their audiences, choosing MIMs because their readers were already established on those platforms. Our work also reveals that news delivered via MIMs focuses mostly on health, emergencies and public safety, civic information, and economic development.