New Paper Is Making Headlines in Tijuana

TIJUANA — With a hefty bankroll and a small army of cub reporters, publishing scion Jose Santiago Healy Loera is out to remake the news in this rambunctious city.

The debut last week of Frontera, the first big independent daily newspaper here, injects a modern style of journalism that mirrors moves elsewhere in Mexico away from the media’s traditionally docile role.

Frontera, with a staff of 30 freshly minted reporters and the snappy color graphics familiar to readers of U.S. newspapers, will take on Baja California’s big daily, El Mexicano, plus three smaller papers.

“We want to be an independent newspaper, a professional newspaper,” Healy, 42, said at the paper’s elegant new offices. Market research has shown that the emerging middle class of Tijuana could sustain such a paper, editors said.

For months, the impending newspaper war has titillated news junkies and others accustomed to daily coverage laden with the drab pronouncements of bureaucrats and ruling-party stalwarts. El Mexicano is run by the state chairman of a huge labor federation tied to the nation’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

While politically independent daily newspapers have bloomed in other cities, that has not happened in Tijuana, despite its embrace of opposition politics and cultural inventiveness. (The newspaper Zeta, famous for its feisty coverage of government misdeeds and drug trafficking, is a weekly.)

“The Tijuana market is one of the last major markets in Mexico to benefit from this new independence in Mexican journalism,” said Chappell Lawson, an assistant professor of political science at MIT who studies the Mexican media and politics. “It’s ripe, if not overripe, for this type of venture. I suspect it will be very successful and have a ripple effect in improving the other papers.”

Healy’s family has a long tenure in publishing, starting when his grandfather bought El Imparcial in the Sonoran capital of Hermosillo in 1942. The family has won a reputation for journalism free of government influence there and in Mexicali, where they have published La Cronica for nine years. The family’s company, Editores del Noroeste, also runs Aguila, a Spanish-language weekly in Tucson.

Healy, a former newspaper and television reporter, says he will have spent $8 million on the Tijuana start-up in the first year. That includes training journalism graduates who may never have written a story outside the classroom. Recruits endured a monthlong crash course, writing mock articles and learning the paper’s format and ethics code, which resembles U.S. daily newspaper standards. For example, it forbids moonlighting for the government or accepting free lunches from sources.

Such rules, and pay double that at other Tijuana papers, are no small matter in a country where the government long shackled the press through control of newsprint, advertising and business subsidies--even cash payments to reporters.

One goal, said managing editor Raul Ruiz Castillo, is to create “a completely new generation” of journalists.

Novice business reporter Rosa Arce Pedroza, who graduated from a Tijuana university in 1997, said newspaper jobs were scarce. She’s cutting her teeth covering cross-border trade but has bigger hopes. “I want to be known as a journalist who can handle any kind of assignment,” she said.

Reporters’ beats include crime, public services, communities, government and border issues. The paper has a two-person bureau in Chula Vista and a team of five for investigations and special projects. The inaugural issue carried a front-page report and color graphic detailing illegal adoptions by foreigners of children in northwestern Mexico.

Ruiz admits some assignments, such as covering drug trafficking, can spell danger for greenhorn journalists. But, he said, “it’s our obligation. It’s part of the daily reality.”

Drugs and violence are not the sole reality. Convinced by reader focus groups that Tijuana gets too much bad press, Ruiz also directed his troops to hunt for upbeat tales and for information that gets things done. A feature called “Direct Dialogue” airs residents’ gripes about problems such as faulty street lights and trash.

Whether the paper will find advertisers and loyal readers--even in a fast-growing city of at least 1.3 million--remains to be seen. As in much of Mexico, Tijuana newspapers are read mainly by business and government elites. Most people, for whom the cost of a 50-cent newspaper can equal an hour’s pay, favor radio and television. Healy is printing 20,000 issues daily and hopes eventually to boost that to 50,000. He is banking on the continued growth of the middle class.

El Mexicano claims to sell 50,000 to 60,000 papers a day, but experts say that figure is probably double the actual sales. While distribution rates in the United States are independently verified, circulation figures in Mexico are closely guarded and often exaggerated.

El Mexicano executives recently gave their paper a more colorful, streamlined design and expanded national news and opinion columns, said managing editor Enrique Sanchez Diaz. The 40-year-old newspaper, long a backer of the PRI, also has had to find room to cover the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, which has ruled state politics for a decade.

“There’s a historical past that’s changed. El Mexicano is a more open newspaper and more pluralistic,” said Sanchez.

All agree there’ll be one sure winner: the reader.