The May 23 launch of the Spanish edition of El País in the United States was a natural next step for the newspaper.

Since its beginning, El País has prioritised international news. Not only does this section open the print edition, but the number and quality of its foreign correspondents and regular contributors have been far superior to any other Spanish-language print news organisation.

The Americas have always occupied a preferential spot in this global effort.

From the United States to Argentina, our coverage — including opinion and culture — has been broader and deeper than the rest of the international Spanish-language media. This has allowed a newspaper originally based in Madrid, almost from its beginnings, to break past the perimeter of its national thinking and become a newspaper of record in Latin America.

Approaching the Americas

This continuous, decades-long effort took a giant step forward in 2013 when we created the online edition of the Americas, taking advantage of the digital universe. The goal was to consolidate and prioritise, from a regional perspective, the enormous volume of information, analysis, and opinion that we were generating on the continent.

It was a decisive moment, a Copernican turn. Besides breaking with the ties of print media, we were leaving behind the preeminence of a Spanish vision of the world (something that had already been under development) to adopt the vision of another continent, the vision of the place where the news was being written. When readers in the Americas opened El País, they found a front-page layout made there, not in Spain.

The result was a success. Following the same logic, it allowed us to improve our teams based in the Americas and create our own editions. First came Mexico (2020), then Colombia (2022), Chile (2023), and finally the United States.

The last step was spurred by two factors that guaranteed a secure horizon. In the United States, with the largest population on the continent — almost 60 million of them Spanish-speaking — we already had a strong and highly qualified team.

In addition, thanks to the Americas edition launched in 2013, we already had millions of readers in the country, thousands of whom were subscribers. In other words, we were not new to the game but already had a community of readers and staff adapted to the territory.

Expanding the base 

From that starting point, we expanded our local staff from Los Angeles to New York to generate high-quality content, set up digital support structures in Mexico and improved our general editing teams.

With these assets and a commercial strategy based on a mix of programmatic advertising, branded content, and events, we have searched for new Spanish-language readers in the United States.

It is not a monolithic audience or one that can be reduced to simple parameters. It is made up of different streaks, often intertwined. There are Latin American expatriates, Spaniards, and English-speaking Americans who can read Spanish.

We have added (and I stress the idea of adding) the Latino reader as an editorial target, whose definition would require another article in itself and who is diverse depending on origin, geographic location, and cultural positioning.

These readers represent a strong and welcome diversity that shares some common traits, including one as familiar and long-standing as the search for well-written, interesting, and rigorous news in a familiar language.

Another determining factor in creating the U.S. edition was the conviction that we were improving the offer inside and outside the country.

Right now, we provide better and more significant information to our geolocalised readers in the United States than we did a year ago, and at the same time we are improving the quality (thanks to the new staff and the greater editing capacity) of the news we distribute to the rest of the world about the United States.

It’s a double play that always benefits the reader.

It is true that all this comes at a time of crisis for the Spanish-language media in the United States. It is terrible, and we hope it will pass as soon as possible. But at the same time, it reaffirms our commitment, established at our foundation and included in our style guide, to offer rigorous, fact-checked, and plural information.

This is the best antidote against the crisis, and it is also our obligation to the Spanish-speaking community in the United States.

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