Heralding an Era Nueva

Venice High School's Spanish-language newspaper, El Heraldo Latino, has only one issue under its belt.

And the Spanish is a little rusty at times.

But modest as the effort is, it appears to be at the leading edge of an incipient trend: the training of would-be journalists to work in America's burgeoning Spanish-language media market.

Many of the thousands of journalists working for Spanish-language newspapers, television and radio stations around the United States are imported from Latin America, the Caribbean or Spain.

So it seemed only natural to teacher Nancy Zubiri, an author and former journalist, to institute a Spanish-language journalism class that could potentially lead students to jobs in the growing domestic market.

"I went to a workshop, and people were saying, 'Well, where do we get training in Spanish in this country?' " she said. "So it seems very appropriate to teach journalism in Spanish because some kids might eventually think about going to [the newspaper] La Opinion or [TV networks] Univision or Telemundo."

The class is part of the school's Bilingual Business and Finance Academy, a program that focuses on building job skills such as computer literacy.

"The idea is to teach students to read and write Spanish better," giving them a greater range of skills to bring to the work world, said Joan Miner, a counselor at Venice High who created the academy.

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Even though U.S.-based Spanish-language media--from radio stations to magazines--are increasing in ratings, circulation and number of outlets in the United States, there is a scarcity of academic programs focusing on the niche, which makes a Spanish journalism class at the high school level unique.

"It's very rare," said Miriam Galicia Duarte, community affairs manager at the Spanish-language daily newspaper La Opinion. Galicia Duarte helps high schools and universities that are trying to create Spanish-language journalism programs for American-born Latinos and others who wish to work in Spanish-language media. She says Spanish-speaking students inquiring about internships often tell her, "I'm taking journalism in English but I can't write Spanish."

At other local high school newspapers, students translate some articles from English into Spanish. But at El Heraldo Latino, where the class is taught in Spanish, the opposite is true: Students translate the front-page articles into English and run the translations on inside pages.