The following is a full transcript from the Hispanic PR Blog Video Interview titled “Still Standing Still Leading: How Fanny Miller Built a Hispanic Media Empire PR PRos Still Pitch.” Noticias Newswire CEO Bill Gato served as moderator. To view the full-length video interview, click here.
BILL: Welcome to the sixth Noticias Newswire and Hispanic PR Blog, Hispanic Marketing Webinar. I’m Bill Gato. I’m the CEO of Noticias Newswire, which is the only Latino-owned press release distribution service in the country. I’m also the publisher of the Hispanic PR Blog. The Hispanic PR Blog is a trade blog and resource for Hispanic and multicultural communications professionals.
Today, I have the honor and the privilege of interviewing Fanny Miller, the CEO of Latina and Associates, which is the parent company of El Latino newspaper in San Diego, the largest Latino-owned Spanish-language publication in California. Fanny is also the founder of the Celebrando Latinas conference, which has become the number one Hispanic women’s empowerment event in the country. The 2025 Celebrando Latinas conference is coming up. It’s around the corner. It’s coming up on Saturday, August 2nd in San Diego. Fanny is also the publisher of ChulaVistaToday.com, which is in combination with the Google News Initiative. And then Fanny’s also a past president — she’s an industry leader — she’s the past president of the National Association of Hispanic Publishers. She also founded the Latina Publishers Association. So we’re going to talk about that today a little bit. Fanny’s originally from Bogota, Colombia. Fanny, un placer y un honor. Thank you for being here.
FANNY: Gracias, Bill. Thank you for having me. It’s really nice to see you. Haven’t seen you in a long time.
BILL: Likewise, Fanny. Fanny, as I was researching your life, I realized it’s like a movie. It’s very cinematic. There were a lot of twists and turns and plot turns. I know that you had a childhood in Bogota, and then your aunt adopted you and your sister Carmen when you were 12, and then you moved to San Diego. What were your earliest impressions as an immigrant? Most of the interviews that I’ve seen with you on YouTube, they’re in Spanish. So I’d love for the English speakers that don’t really know your immigrant story…your impressions of the people, the culture in San Diego when you first arrived. And how did that shape you?
FANNY: So actually, it was five of us that were adopted, five siblings. Carmen is the one that was at the newspaper for a longer time. It was 1979. We actually flew into Florida, Miami. And then from there, we took a bus all the way to San Diego, California. It was strange. I mean, what can I say? It was strange. So I got here when I was 13, and I went into middle school. I didn’t speak English. And the Miller comes from my adopted dad. My aunt was married to a Miller. Very nice guy. Very nice. I only lived with them for three years, from 13 to 15. And then, I was sent to Utah for the biggest sin of having a Mexican boyfriend at the time. 1979 in San Diego, we came to Carlsbad, in San Diego. It’s kind of north towards LA. It was a very small town back then. The high school was…there were very, very few of us Latinos. And there was only a couple of African Americans in the school. So, it wasn’t very diverse. But of course, we came from speaking Spanish, loving Spanish. So Spanish was what we felt comfortable with. So we always continued our Spanish. I remember when I was in middle school, eighth or seventh grade, I guess I talked too much. And the teacher told me, “Fanny, you talk too much.” So she sent me to English-only classes. I did not have any ESL (English as a Second Language), any help anymore. And I think it was the best thing that happened to me. Because you kind of tend to hang out with who you could talk to and express yourself. I worked in a 7-Eleven in Oceanside that the Millers had.
BILL: Okay, so you arrive in Carlsbad, you’re going to middle school there. What are the demographics like? I mean, are there any other Colombians there? Are there other Hispanics there?
FANNY: Back then? No. Now? Yes. (Laughs)
BILL: In Miami, everyone’s Hispanic. But at the time in the late 70s, what was that like?
FANNY: There were little clusters, like los barrios. And in Carlsbad, where we were at, it was very small. I think on the streets, there were like maybe two, three blocks where they concentrated. But no, it wasn’t that much. I don’t remember the demographics, but right now it’s 30% Latinos in San Diego County. So, over like 1.1 million and still small. But it was a really small, nice little town. But, we kind of grew and we went a little bit more to Oceanside where I worked at the 7-Eleven. So I left to Utah for a year. Yes, I did. I was a Mormon for a while. The family was really great. They didn’t speak Spanish. In Utah back then, even the Mexicans didn’t speak Spanish. It really helped me with the English. So, I was totally immersed into the English. Like a year later, I came back to California. And then ever since I’ve been on my own, I was like 15, 16, I was 16. I was working at a clothing store. And then I was going to, what I call a drive-thru school, because it was kind of what they teach you in six months that you’re supposed to learn in two years. Then I started living with my sisters. And that’s when we, at 21, launched El Latino.
BILL: So what was the media landscape like when you first got to San Diego? What were you exposed to? Spanish-language radio? English pop radio? News? Newspapers? What was that like?
FANNY: There were some newspapers. My sister actually worked in one of them in the North County. She was there for a while. There was a couple of them in San Diego, but they were in English. They targeted the Hispanic community, but they were written in English. So in Spanish, no, there wasn’t that many.
BILL: So when you turn 21, in 1988, there’s a meeting where it’s your sister, Carmen, two other sisters, one of their husbands, and one of their boyfriends. The six of you come together and you have this idea of launching a Spanish-language newspaper, El Latino. How did that happen? Was it because your sister had some newspaper experience and you saw the need in the market?
FANNY: Yes, she was there for a while. What she used to say is that there was just a lot of need and a lot of things that she thought could be done with it. But the gentleman that was the publisher didn’t really care for it. He was in accounting. So it was more like to advertise his own business. So then we got together and she said, “Hey, I have this great idea.” Some of them put money. I think we came like with $20,000. I didn’t have any money at the beginning. So I said, “I’ll just put my work and my time.” I was going to school and I was working at the store. It was the Kmart store, actually, that don’t exist anymore. So I said, “I’ll do it.” So that’s how it started. Yeah, of course, we didn’t have any experience. I don’t have any experience. The $20,000 kind of flew by in the first six months. And after the first six months, four of them left. They said, “This is not for me.” I was able to stay because I didn’t have any kids at the time. I didn’t have a lot of responsibilities. So I was able to sacrifice it for a little bit longer. We were in Oceanside. So we moved back south. We started moving south because we realized that the agencies and the national accounts did not know where Oceanside was. So we kind of moved back to San Diego.
BILL: Fanny, what were those early months like, those first six months? Did someone on the team have print design experience? Did someone have journalism experience to write the articles? Carmen was the first publisher and editor, and then you took on the sales side. Tell me about that. Why did you pick sales and how did that shape you later on to sell?
FANNY: So we kind of did everything, all of us. I was not a writer, so we hired people that could do that work. We also hired people that knew about design, and we learned from them. Then we continued from them. So I learned how to do paste up. You know, when we had to cut the papers, you printed them out, somebody else would write it, somebody else would proofread it. Then I got into the sales. So I was mostly into the sales and the distribution part of it. The distribution part of it was interesting because we didn’t know the towns. We kind of knew the ZIP codes and the demographics, but we kind of chased the barrios, where we knew Latinos lived. So we started coming down. I remember opening up the routes in San Diego. Then we got Logan Heights, we got all those areas. And then we had to go and ask the person, the store, “Hey, can I leave the newspaper here? It’s free to the readers and it has local news.” So that’s how I kind of started going south. And we had a lot of times where we just didn’t have any money. But I don’t know if it was because we were young. We had no other option but to make it work. You know, that’s how I see it. I mean, there is no like, “I’m going to go do something else.” In my head, I had to make it work. We had to make it work. So you just concentrate on working, on doing what you were supposed to do. So in the sales part, I also had to become a salesperson, which I never had any training. I mean, at 21, what do you know?
BILL: Do you remember the first ad you sold?
FANNY: No, I don’t remember. I remember the first time we got stuck and we needed money. I remember we went to this store. It was a Mexican store where they sell food and stuff. I think the name was Torero or something like that. And we talked to the owner and the wife and they paid us up front. Like, I think they paid us like two months up front. Totally trusting that we were going to deliver. But we’ve had customers like that since the beginning. And we still have customers like that. Last week I went to a customer and said, “Hey, I need to have a payment.” You know, he pays me quarterly. So, it’s that trust that we have been able to give the customers that has worked and we’re still here.
BILL: I love those stories. Fanny, so the first six years, it’s you and Carmen. You guys stuck it out. And then right around 1994, for some reason, Carmen leaves. You were at it for six years at that point. I’m sure you felt like you had a handle on the newspaper business at that point. And then you remain the sole publisher. What was that decision like? And then you bought out her shares from what I’ve read. So what was that like in those early days of just you being a solopreneur?
FANNY: I was not totally alone. I had another partner for a while there for some years. But I was the one in charge of the distribution part of it, the sales. I became the sales force of it. I was really shy. I was an introvert. It would take a lot out of me to go out and do sales. But I just needed to do it. I mean, it was a survival mode. It was the age. I also did start having mentors at the beginning. I had one here from San Diego, which is now the San Diego Business Journal. Their publisher, she was a mentor for us for a while. All the publications were going from being free to the readers to being sold. We didn’t like the idea, but everybody else was doing it. We thought, okay, maybe if everybody else is doing it, they’re correct in doing it. And we talked to her. They had just gone from free to paid, and she told us, “Don’t do it.” We liked it. We stayed free. We’re still free to the reader. So we had mentors from the beginning, on and off. And some don’t even know they’re your mentors, but it’s people that were in the same industry. You know, people like you, when I met you, many years ago, people that had the education, the training, the experience of what we were doing. So I always pick their brains. A lot of the things that we did at the beginning — or that I did at the beginning — was asking “How do you do this? How do you pay? How do you pay the distribution? Do you pay per thousand? Do you pay per copy? How do you negotiate with the printer? What is the cost of paper? So, all that — with salespeople, the commissions. So, that’s how I went through — and still am — through many years. It’s just asking and kind of getting to know what’s going on in the industry.
BILL: So Fanny, would you say that from a leadership perspective, in terms of the lessons you learned at that time, seeking mentors is one of the lessons you learned when you first went solo?
FANNY: Yes. Yes. In Hispanic publishing, I think there were quite a few mentors back then. There’s not a lot of them now. Some of them have, of course, passed away, but some of them really helped me. And I think also because I was young, maybe because I was a woman? I don’t know, but they never saw me as a threat to give me information. I don’t know if they did it between them, but I was always very lucky and very blessed that they would share their experiences or their knowledge with me. Some of them I took, some of them I did not agree with. If you ask me things that I did right and things that I did wrong, it’s that I hesitated to go with my gut feeling and I went with somebody else’s advice. But for the most part, I think I have stayed with my own gut feeling and my own — how I want to do this. Of course, there’s been some mistakes, but I’m still here after 38 years.
BILL: Fanny, tell me about the content. How did you structure the content of El Latino early on? How did you improve it? How did you start catering to the San Diego Hispanic population with your content?
FANNY: The content has always been local. I believe that one of the reasons a lot of publications have gone out of business is because they became national news. Of course, picking up national news is a lot cheaper, less expensive than actually having somebody to go and report, having a reporter and stuff. That is, of course, more expensive. So local has always been the key. And then there’s subjects. I mean, there’s things that I like, but I don’t put it in El Latino because I know my reader. It’s not really something that they look for. So you have to also know your reader. What is it that they need? Also, it has to be useful information, Bill. You know, a lot of people just throw in a lot of filler content — para rellenar — and to fill in. We don’t. We struggle with space every week. We have more information [than we have space for]. Talking about PR, we have some that they will send me information and say, “Hey, this is really good.” But is it useful for my reader? Is it something that would be useful in their daily life? Something they’re going to use in a positive way? If it’s not, then no. There’s a lot of information. So we make it useful. So it has to be local information, targeted information, which is some of the cities: San Diego, of course, being the largest one, Chula Vista being the second largest one in San Diego County. We cover those areas. But your coverage should be dictated by your reader, not us dictate to the reader what we want them to read. We do some of the local sports. That takes time. You know, one of the things that I like to cover, probably nobody does them locally, is the Mexican soccer leagues. The Latino soccer leagues. They’re huge in San Diego. There’s a lot more that we could do, definitely. But staying local is the way to do it. Staying local is more expensive. But if you could figure out what’s important and what subjects are important, what’s important to the reader, then you just do that. You go to those different subjects.
BILL: Fanny, I remember when I first met you, like in 2003 or so, you had an editor at the time, Alejandro Maciel, I think, or he was there for a while, maybe a couple of years. And then he went on to to the L.A. Times en Español or La Opinion. So you had some really good editors and reporters for a while there, right? I imagine that as you grew, you were able to hire sharper talent. Can you tell me about those decisions and your hiring of journalists and editors?
FANNY: So I believe our first editor was Maricarmen Hernandez. Maricarmen Hernandez was the director for La Universidad in Tijuana in the journalism department. We learned a lot from her. I think when you hire somebody, yeah, they work, but you also need to learn from them, right? And so that’s what we did. She was our first one. With her came some of her students, you know. Diana Cervantes was one of her students. Edith was one of her students, and then other ones. So she was here, she did it for a while, taught us a lot, trained us a lot. And from there, we always had different editors, Alejandro being one of them. The challenge with having somebody that has had many different jobs in many different media and different markets is that they have to know your market. My market is very different than you know where you’re at, Bill, which is Florida or Miami, so you have to know the market. I’m Colombian, but 85 percent of my readers are Mexican. I also have to know this market. Most of my readers think that I’m Mexican. And that’s okay. That’s okay, but you have to know your market. Their culture. What their needs are. What do they want to know about? So one of the things that we want to do is we do a lot of the education stuff but you have to know the market so, yeah, we have had many different editors. Today I’m the Editor just because I know the market, but I do have reporters. I have one of the reporters that’s been with us I think Horacio Renteria has been with us for over 20 years. The community knows Horacio more than they know me. And that’s the way it should be. When I go with him to events, he presents people to me. He knows them because he’s been out there. I don’t micromanage him. He’s out there and he’s also part of the community. I think it’s important for your reporter to live within the community. He lives in Chula Vista. He knows what’s going on in the city, in the county. After many years he just became a U.S. Citizen. So he’s going to vote for the first time. But he’s he knows more politics than a lot of citizens because he’s covered them. The reporter has to be from the community, from that city. It’s very hard to get somebody to cover the community when they don’t live within the community.
BILL: Fanny, so I imagine you’ve had situations where you’ve got this top-notch journalist, they’re a world-class writer or world-class journalist, but they just don’t know the audience there that well. It sounds like you’ve had that issue.
FANNY: Yes. Yeah. We had that issue. And because I think journalists or any business person kind of forgets who they work for. We work for the reader. So you have to target them and serve the reader. Sometimes they want to serve themselves. I had one time, I think it was an editor or reporter that she just loved art, and the theater, and she would want to write pages about it. I’m like, Okay, yeah, that’s really cool. It’s really nice. But, do we want to write about education and the school system, how the system works? Or do we want to write about something that people are not asking about just because that person, the reporter, likes that subject. So you’ve got to be careful with that. Now with the internet, there’s so much information out there that you have to also be even more careful now of what you print and what information you have.
BILL: Speaking of audience, can you tell me more about the Hispanic from that area, from San Diego? For people like me that are from Miami, or someone from New York, Chicago, that doesn’t know the Hispanic demographic in San Diego. I did see one interview where you said that all Latinos have the same needs. We’re very similar in that sense. But I’m sure that there are nuances to the San Diego Hispanic. Can you share a little bit about your audience and how have they evolved over the years?
FANNY: Yeah, we’re not very different. Our needs are not very different than other Latinos in other cities, but also other communities. We want to know about education. We want to know about health. We do want to know about immigration. It affects us. And what we have found out is that it doesn’t matter if you’re first or second generation. A lot of us don’t know how the system works. San Diego is also a big county. It’s small compared to other ones — but it’s big. We also have the border. And then we have, going north, the border. It doesn’t influence their day-to-day life. But, there’s the border area that does get affected by the crossing every day. So you have that dynamic. We’re very close to Mexico, but we don’t cover Mexico. We don’t have any news from Mexico. We’re here. That’s also something that is very important is to know the market. I mean, if anybody wants to know about what’s going on in Mexico, well, there’s newspapers online. There’s places that you have access to go. But for us, it’s just staying local. We do have the regional readers, the people that cross. They just want to know what’s going on here. But our readers are in San Diego. I want to say that it’s like about 80% Mexicanos, Mexican. But then we also have the Colombians, Puerto Ricans, but they’re very small. There’s a very small group. Now you’re seeing more, the houses, the groups getting together. The Colombians have grown a lot in the last five years, six years, but still the big chunk is Mexicanos. It’s Mexicans.
BILL: I imagine that after 37 or 38 years of running El Latino, some of your audience has grown with you or you’ve grown with the second or third generations that were born in the ’80s in San Diego. So do you kind of assume that they’ve learned English and they’re reading or consuming other media in English? And so you’re sticking with the more first generation, recently arrived Spanish-dominant reader? You’re going to cater to them, not a bilingual audience? How do you make those decisions in terms of who do we stick with?
FANNY: Yes. All the time. People have come to us and said, “Hey, I kind of grew up with El Latino because my mom or my abuelita always had it, always requested it.” So we have that second generation that grew up with it, maybe because their parents or their grandparents were readers for many years. We’re not going to serve everybody. We’re going to serve a certain group of Latinos. What we have, Bill, is that people trust. And right now, with so much information coming from everywhere, that has been one of our weapons — that people trust us. We’re not going to print anything that has not been verified. We’re not going to print anything just because we want to fill in information or because we want the reader that likes the controversial article. With so much information, you cannot serve everybody in the same way. You have to understand — and I understood that from the beginning — El Latino print is one business and one platform; El Latino online is a different one. The social media part of it is a different one. So you have to know each one of them. Like El Latino online is a younger reader. And one of the other things is that — when you asked me about the beginning — we were welcomed and not welcomed by the Latinos in the San Diego big city. Why? Because we were doing it in Spanish. Why? Because they could not read it. You know, they could not read it. They felt like, “Okay, this is a product for me, but I can’t read it.” Well, now we see that a lot more Latinos are speaking and reading in Spanish. And this is very important. Two very important things that I would tell you that my experience has been: First, we don’t cover the community. We are the community. I live here. I don’t live in another state. You know, I vote here. So being part of this community is very important.
The other thing is that we Latinos, we think in English, but we really feel in Spanish. It’s not the same, saying, “Te quiero” versus “I love you.” We feel in Spanish. So that’s why when somebody asks me — especially the General Market — “Why Spanish?” I say, “Because that’s our language and that’s what we feel.” It’s a very different feeling when you read a book in Spanish or when you read a book in English. Sometimes even if it’s the same book. The language is very important to us. I mean, I have people that have been with El Latino for 20 years as readers, and we have people that, they’re maybe less than, a year, but they received it and they started reading it because we did an interview on somebody that they follow or on themselves, because we have a lot of young business owners, young people that need to know the system. I mean, one of the things that we do that a lot of maybe other media doesn’t do is that we could go in-depth and provide more information in an article. Let’s just say when we talk about immigration and everything that is going on, you have all these little pieces that you see on social media, but you really don’t know if it’s true or not. So what the paper gives them is that security that it is accurate. And also that they can reach us. I mean, we’re not unknown. We have an office. We have a phone number. It’s been the same phone number for the last 37 years. We have that connection with the reader.
BILL: Throughout the 90s, when you took over, and into the 2000s, what were some of the strategies that you used to grow audience and revenue, which were very effective?
FANNY: So one of the decisions we made was to go weekly. We used to go bi-weekly. In ’92, we went weekly. And then we started coming to the biggest market, which was San Diego, the city of San Diego. And then we started selling to the corporations, to the national corporations. We have always had a good amount of local customers. About 80% of our customers are local and like 20% are national or corporate. It’s the banks, the big companies. But our core is the small business. So, staying local and being accessible to local customers has also been a big decision, making it where they could advertise with us for pennies. And the distribution has also been important, sticking with the ZIP codes, with the cities. One of the other decisions — probably the most important decision — is that we do our own distribution. We have always done it in-house. Right now I have one company that does the big stores, like the food stores and things like that. But 80% we do ourselves. So what that gives us is that we know where it gets picked up. And we also keep track of the pickup rate. If you probably saw my social media, you see that — I think it was this January — I went out and I was doing distribution. I call it going back to basics, going out to the streets, going to see what’s going on. And that’s very important because I have seen a lot of companies, a lot of publishers that put a lot of money into distribution and it was not being distributed. But that happens usually with big companies. And since we’re not a big company, we want to keep track of every copy that we distribute and know where it’s going.
BILL: Thank you, Fanny. So I want to shift to digital. When the internet started getting more and more powerful, a lot of print publications in the country — especially the daily newspapers — took a big hit. Their circulations started declining. Readers were going online for the news now. And so how did you navigate that and survive all these years as a print and online product, outlasting competitors in the Hispanic space and even like well-funded general market players like UT en Español. What’s been your secret to your longevity, your resilience?
FANNY: Ahh Bill, you want me to tell you my secrets now? (laughs) I think since 1988 when we began, we were told that people didn’t read. And we were told that Latinos didn’t read. I’ve been listening to the same song since the beginning. We have just stayed on course of who we serve and what information we want to give them, what information they’re requesting or they need. So we’ve always been there. In the ‘90s, when a lot of the General Market publications started going out of business, I really think they killed themselves, because they were the ones that advertised the most that nobody was reading them. They advertised it themselves. And then they started sending — and they still do — they want to send everybody online. Well, there’s some people that do not want to go online. There’s some people that prefer to have the hard copy. Also, with the General Market, they started doing national news. I mean, there’s so much national news. Something happens in Florida and all the publications have it within minutes. We don’t do national news, unless it’s like immigration or things that are going to affect your health or education. We stay local. And I believe that newspapers were meant to stay local, to be local, not to be the national news. But a lot of them started doing the national news and getting rid of their local reporters and their local news. So, to give you an example, I mean, I see it, you have 80% of their information is national, and then, 20% or less could be local. But the national stories, people are getting it online. So why do you want to repeat what people are already getting online? It’s a different platform. It’s a different business. The problem is that they’ve been wanting to treat it all the same. I don’t think one has to replace the other one. I think they’re just two different businesses. That’s what I have done: treat them as a totally different business.
BILL: Fanny, would you say that your location allows you to have a steady stream of fresh immigrants that are coming in through the Tijuana border into the San Diego area, settling there first? Does that give you sort of an endless supply of new Spanish-dominant readers that are coming into your area? Whereas maybe other regions of the country, they see that their readers are kind of passing away and then the younger generation is more internet-savvy. Does that influence these dynamics?
FANNY: San Diego is a very interesting market. Nationwide, we’re like the 13th in demographics. In spending, I believe we’re the 10th. We are the largest and the biggest border in the world. But when it comes to people, in San Diego, a lot of the newcomers, they do stay, but not a lot of them. A lot of them jump San Diego. Why? Because San Diego is an expensive city. So what we target and what we really want to serve are the Latinos that are living here. But the Latinos that are living here, the first and second generations, they still want to know about immigration because, even if they’re not affected personally, they have somebody within their family or community that is being affected. So we don’t target just the newcomer. Of course, the information — if they’re here in San Diego — the information that we have will serve them in this new city, in their new home.
BILL: Thank you, Fanny. So, okay. So in the early 2000s, when I met you, 2003, we were launching Hispanic Digital Network. We were part of Hispanic PR Wire, my partner Manny Ruiz’s company. And we were trying to get our press releases into the homepages of newspaper websites. And what we noticed at the time was that a lot of Hispanic newspapers didn’t even have a website or they had a very rudimentary website. So we were like, Hey, let’s offer — this is in the days before WordPress — let’s offer the publishers a free, top-notch website, and then we can have a little feed on the homepage with our press releases. That was the idea behind that. And you were an early adopter. Thank God, because you gave us credibility early on. Thank you, Fanny. And you, La Raza — Robert Armband was an early supporter. I’ve noticed a trend where you adopt new platforms, digital platforms that come out. You did that with us. You did it with NewsPack. You did it with the Google News Initiative, which is now a partnership that you have for a gateway website called ChulaVistaToday.com. Can you tell me about what drives you to be so open to trying new platforms? You were even on Lionheart Digital for a while. You’ve tested so many different local news website platforms and networks. Tell me about what did you learn from those experiences? Why are you so eager to adopt new platforms? What are the best ones that have worked that you’ve noticed in terms of serving the reader and digital revenues, et cetera?
FANNY: From the beginning, Bill, we wanted to learn from the best. And we wanted to learn from people that already had the experience. And you guys had the experience. You guys had a lot of excitement and for us it just made sense to do it. It wasn’t painful. It was just learning a lot of stuff. And that’s probably one of the things that are still going on today. A lot of publishers didn’t want anything to do with websites. Like, okay, do it because I need to have it and that’s it. Some of them still there. And I think it’s because of that notion that one will replace the other one. And I think once the publisher understands that it’s two different monsters, two different businesses, one has to complement the other one, but one does not have to replace it. So for us it just made sense to do it. It was a really good learning experience. I learned a lot about how the PR works from you guys. I wish I had known more from the beginning, just because it’s a need, just to understand that part of the industry, because we get so many press releases. Once email came into place, we get just too much. Each one that we participated in, you just learn. Sometimes the change is the hardest thing for a publisher to do, just to get out of that comfort zone, to get out of what I know. It’s taken me years. I just want to say we’re not in a partnership with the Google News Initiative. We got a grant. It was a grant to do the Chula Vista Today. It was in a partnership also with a Canadian newspaper publishers that we implemented and they helped us implement the platform for Chula Vista Today. It was an idea or experiment to do local, very local websites. It was totally new for us because it’s in English, so that was our first online platform 100 percent in English. That has been a challenge and something new, but we see that a lot of Latinos want to be served in English just because they could maybe read it a little bit better. We saw a lot of faster integration with the site on the reader side but that’s just for a city. El Latino is county-wide. You just have to make those changes. I remember when we were with you guys and we had meetings, you guys talked to us in a language that we did not understand, the online English. Now it’s so much easier. Before I used to say that, in the website, they would hold you hostage if you got somebody that didn’t know the language and it would take him a day or two to upload a news story, so a lot of the partners that we have had with the website has been a learning experience. And we have to learn more, but now — compared to what it used to be — it’s a piece of cake. But it’s a different market. It’s a different reader also.
BILL: How’s it going with Chula Vista Today?
FANNY: It’s going. We finished the program. It was a two-year program. So now I’m trying to find a little bit more funding to get it where we would like to have it. We have also been asked by other cities if we could do the same thing that we did with Chula Vista, to do it in other cities. The way that it’s guided, the plan, it makes total sense for cities, but right now we’re just working it as we can. But even on the sales part, even though some of the corporations know that we have it and we advertise it, they still want mainly El Latino and then El Latino online. We’re still learning from it because it’s a different market. It’s in English, even though Chula Vista has 65 percent Latinos in the population.
BILL: Fanny, I want to ask you about trade organizations like the NAHP. You were President of the National Association of Hispanic Publishers, the NAHP. When we launched HDN 22 years ago we could go there and offer the HDN services to all the publishers. It was a place where they would meet several times a year. They launched in the early ‘80s. How helpful were those organizations for you early on? Not just the NAHP, but like the NAA, which is now called — it’s got a different name now — the Newspaper Association of America, for example. How helpful was it to attend those trade shows, those events, and be a member of those organizations early on? And then what was your experience like as the president of that organization?
FANNY: So I began going to the NAHP when I was like 23 or 24 years old. I remember it was in Las Vegas. It was a big organization back then. Of course, I was young, Latina, and I was one of the few Latina publishers at the time. A lot of them were couples. They were married couples, but mainly the man would be the one leading the organization or representing the publisher. I had a lot of mentors. They had a lot of good information, but I believe that a lot of the information was tailored to the editorial part of it, but not to the sales part of it. But I learned from Eddie Escobedo from Las Vegas. He was one of my mentors. Robert Armband from Chicago, from La Raza, and then his partner, Luis Rossi — one of the people that I always could go to and ask him questions. But most of them were just, you know, being able to call them and ask them. I mean, some of the publishers at the Union-Tribune here in San Diego — Jeff Light that was there for years — I could also call him or we’d just have lunch once a year and we talked. These are big corporations that have so much knowledge and, for me, it was a thrill to be able to learn from them. But a lot of the times I would write down and remember the questions and what I wanted to talk about. Some of the other Latino publishers came into town that were part of the U-T. We also met and I learned from them. On the sales part, I would learn from it. NAA also. I went to the conferences. A lot of those conferences that I went to, yeah, you would learn about the industry, but for me it was mainly to connect with advertisers. It was important for me to learn what an advertiser is looking for, not just what I want to tell them, but, what is it that they need? They need the CPMs. They need the information. We made changes throughout the years in size, in rates, just to be more with the market, than just kind of have it in my own way. So, yeah, the organizations are important, but I think it’s more important for you to be able to have — even if it’s a couple of them — publishers that you could call, that you could ask them any question that you need, just to get the business point. One advice I give to all the publishers when they ask me is — and I learned it from a publisher in New York, from El Especialito, from Tony Ibarria — to be your best salesperson. You do have other people that sell for you, but you have to learn about sales and you have to learn about marketing. And you have to get out of your comfort zone and you have to go to events and you have to network and you have to go to chambers. That’s the most important part, because it will take you years to learn something that if you ask a publisher that has been publishing for, 10, 15, 20 years, they already know it. Most publishers — most, I’m not going to say all of them — are more than willing to share the information with you if you could have a relationship with them. I have had a really good relationship with publishers from my city and from outside of my city. So, yeah, that’s probably one of the biggest things that you could do for any business. That’s what I have done.
BILL: Somewhere around 2018 or 2019 you become the President of the NAHP. That must have been really exciting for you, going from San Diego to becoming the leader of the national organization of Hispanic Publishers. What insights did you learn? What were the challenges that you heard from the other publishers — now that you’re in that role as the president? How did the NAHP help publishers meet those challenges, overcome those challenges? Any other insights from a leadership perspective at that national level that you can share about your time. This was around 2019, 2020, around the pandemic.
FANNY: I had been part of the NAHP on and off for many years. I was a member and they called me and they said they were going through some transitional issues and they wanted to ask me if I was up for being part of it. You know, I called a few friends, asked, and they said, “Yeah, if you get in, maybe we could do so much with the organization.” So I said yes. And did I learn a lot? Yes, I learned a lot. The organization didn’t have a board at the time, so I was able to bring some people on. I wanted to be able to work as a team. We started getting some of the buys. In the time that I was there, we probably received like $3.7 million dollars in media buys. We were also able to do the yearly conference. It was a challenge at the beginning, but we did good. I learned that not all publishers want to work together. I learned that there’s a big need for the publishers to come together. It’s a challenge also, I guess, probably like with any other organization. It’s a challenge to stay in focus of what you want, just because every publisher is not at the same level. Some of them are second generation. They don’t believe in what their their product is. So it’s a challenge, because some of them — I call them the juniors — they grew up in the industry but they didn’t work in the industry so now they’re kind of taking over from their parents but their vision is not the same as their parents, so that makes it a challenge, you know, when I was there. I have a list of active publications. There’s probably about 150, between weeklies and biweeklies — still print publications — that are in Spanish, mainly. Some of them have bilingual, but mainly, probably 80% of them are in Spanish. When I was there during the pandemic, I was able to work with Google for a media buy that they did to support local media, the campaigns that they did. And the way that I was helping them, I was able to tell them which publications were actually up to date and were publishing. The pandemic — we learned a lot, because everybody had to get online. So a lot of the publishers had no choice but to start really moving their online platform. So that was also something good that happened during the pandemic as people were getting the information through the online. We did not stop printing. We lowered our printing, but we still had printing just because there was a lot of fake news online. So yeah, with the NAHP, it was a good experience. From there, I left. I didn’t want to participate anymore because it had a lot of challenges with the new board that was taking over the organization. And also the industry is still — or at least in that organization — there are still a lot of men there and a lot of boys in the organization. But, there’s a lot of Latinas and a lot of women that are publishers. You know, from when I started, kind of being one of the few, now about 65% of the publishers for the Latino publications — print publications — are women and are Latinas. And that’s a market that we have not served and that we have not been served. That’s why I began Latina Publishers Association, and that’s been one of my goals: to work more with Latina publishers. We kind of work a little bit different. We are entrepreneurs, we’re publishers, we’re mothers, we’re wives, very involved in the community. So I think the Latina publisher, in essence, is a little bit different than the male publisher.
BILL: Fanny, I want to go back real quick to something you said. When the pandemic hit in 2020, you’re saying that there was a certain number of Hispanic publishers in this country who didn’t have a web presence at all? They were strictly print, and then they had a digital barrier. They couldn’t communicate with their readers because of the pandemic? Was it a lot of publishers?
FANNY: No, not a lot, but there were quite a few. And some of them did have their platform, but they really did not use it, like they were not feeding it daily. And when it came to the pandemic, we had to feed it by the hour because things were changing so much. So I think it was a learning experience for the publishers and even for us, because we were feeding it, but we were not feeding it by the hour. I had no choice. You had to pay attention to the online platform. I’m not going to say a lot, but some of the publishers had the website, but a lot of us did not understand how important the online platform was for the updates, the by-the-minute and by-the-hour news cycle.
BILL: Why launch the Latina Publishers Association? How is it different from the NAHP — obviously, aside from the gender? When did you launch it? How many members are part of it?
FANNY: So I launched it in 2021. As a Latina — and me talking to many Latina publishers — there’s some Latina publishers that are just ahead of the game. They incorporated their social media, their online presence — ahead. Most of them have not. One of the reasons also is that, when I started — and it’s also publishers that are new publishers, that are doing maybe their online presence only, but they’re new publishers and they’re young. So I think the LPA is mostly to help that segment. And also on the business part of it. There’s been a lot of grants and a lot of money and a lot of news on getting funding and getting grants for local businesses. The Latina publishers are not anywhere to be found, okay, because everybody is in their own world, hustling and working their own business. With LPA, we do get together. I talk to publishers. Right now there’s Google in the State of California. They’re giving so much funding to the publishers, to the local media. I’m working with some other organizations to make sure that the Latina publishers, we get a piece of that pie, because we don’t have the funds to go lobbying and to go and be present in Sacramento. We don’t have that. We don’t have the time or the budget to do that. We need somewhere to come together and be able to talk about our business openly. There’s some publishers that I say “I understand that you need a website. You need to change it. You need to do this. You need to do that.” So it’s just a lot of helping each other, mostly with information of what’s going on, participating and the language. When I learned about grants it was during the pandemic. I had never applied for a grant. I had never been part of a grant before the pandemic. So I learned that. And a lot of us publishers do not know that we could apply for grants. So that’s also one of the reasons. So it’s a lot of the resources. Right now we have probably about 30 of us who are active. And then, we need to do more to be bigger. But I don’t want to become bigger. We want to be able to be able to help each other, just like any other network of business and being open about it.
BILL: Thank you, Fanny. So I want to pivot to Cerebrando Latinas. In 2011, you launched a women’s empowerment event called Celebrando Latinas. There’s a lot of interviews on YouTube in Spanish where you’re talking about the genesis of it. For the English-speaking audience, can you tell us more about that event and what inspired you to launch it 14 years ago? Why do you think you’ve stood the test of time with the event, too?
FANNY: So there was two things about the event, Bill. So there’s the marketing part and then there’s the need part. I used to go to New York and I used to go to all these different conferences. The data on Latinas is crazy. I mean, they know how much lipstick, how much we buy. But then there was always a saying, “We know that the Latina market is a very unique market. We need to reach that market.” But they really couldn’t figure out how to reach it. The Latina market is a very different market because it’s a loyal market. It’s not easy to change brands. So, for me, learning all that and paying attention as a Latina. And then, the other part was, I think I had had my third child by then, my youngest son, Diego. And I went through a depression. I didn’t even know I was in a depression. My thinking was, okay, when somebody told me, “You don’t sound right, maybe you’re depressed.” And I’m like, “No, I’m not depressed.” You know, the Latino way. I said, “There’s no reason for me to be depressed. I have a good business. My business was growing. I had three kids. They were healthy. I had an okay relationship. I mean, there was no reason in my head to be, but I was. So in my search to find my own health, to heal me, or to find out why I was depressed — and that’s still going on because you kind of never finish — I find out that I was not the only one. I find out that a lot of us, mujeres, Latinas in business, we kind of tend to take care of everybody. I was taking care of my employees. I was taking care of my writers. I was taking care of my family. I was taking care of my friends. I was taking care of everybody, but I wasn’t taking care of myself. So then I started taking care of myself in different ways. I was part of an event here in San Diego. They had conferences in different cities. It was called Speaking of Women’s Health. It was a national event. And so they did it. I was part of the committee for there for some years. It was one of the largest ones nationwide in Spanish. And then they canceled it. They quit, they canceled it, and they said, “We’re not doing it anymore.” So when that happened, it just kind of ticked me. I’m like, okay, I have all this knowledge. There’s this big need. So we incorporated. That one was only on Health. So we incorporated, we did the Health and Beauty the first year. So, Celebrando is a day for you to be pampered. It’s your day. So it’s a day, you know, no kids, no husband, just for you to be with your friends, tus amigas. It’s a whole conference. And then the second year or third year, we incorporated the Business part. So we saw that a lot of Latinas, just like me, start their business with no formal experience or education.They just get passionate about something. So we incorporated the Business part of it. And then, years later, we realized — and I think I do it probably from my own experience that I went through in the business — so then the fourth one was, okay, we take care of our emotions, we take care of our mental health, we do our business, but then we have financial problems. Okay, so how do we learn Financial, which is a topic that gets us scared sometimes? It’s like we could make the money but we don’t know how to manage the money. So then we put the Finance part of it. So we have those four topics. The Beauty part is, we have a Fashion Show, we have Makeup, we have pampering stuff. So right now we have about 120 Exhibitors. 80 percent of them, I want to say 85 percent of them are a small Latina and non-Latina businesses — and it could be men also — but most of them are Latina businesses, you know, mom and pop shops, they’re beginning their businesses so we make it accessible for them. And also, it was very important for us, or for me, to give something nice, which is in a nice hotel, because a lot of the everyday Latina with their small business or just the homemaker, the Latina that stays home, they never really get to go to a nice conference at a beautiful hotel, because part of the taking care of you is doing it in a nice place. So we did it at the Hilton for many years. This year, we’re changing to a new hotel which just opened. It’s a resort. It’s a beautiful hotel. So it’s a nice hotel. It’s the four topics that we need in the event. Also, the same way that I do El Latino, the event is not my event. So it’s not square. I have some of them come and say “Hey, can I do this do Zumba at the Expo Hall? Can I promote my business this way?” So, we do it all. So that’s how Celebrando began. Celebrando began in 2011, so this is going to be our 15th year doing the conference. We have had up to 1,500 Latinas. Last year we had 900, coming back, our second year coming back after the pandemic. It’s a day to get inspired. It’s also a day where we do have celebrities that come, but they do not play the celebrity role that day. It is very important at Celebrando to be part of the event, spend time with the attendees, take that part. And also what makes it more interesting, more special is that it’s all in Spanish. This year we’re having Sheynnis Palacios. She was Miss Universe in 2023 from Nicaragua. And it’s the first year we’re going to have a Miss Universe, but she’s going to talk about mental health or her experience with mental health. She has a really awesome story. So we expect a sold-out event. Start at 9 AM. We have workshops in the morning about the same topics. And then we have a two-hour lunch. That’s where we have the speakers, the fashion show. We have more expo and then more workshops in the afternoon. And then we finish with a fiesta, a fiesta in a terrace where we could network in. So that’s how it started. So it combines both of them. So the selling of Celebrando, from the beginning and still today, is because there’s nothing to compare it with. Some of the sponsors will ask, “Well, what is your demographics?” My demographics is Latinas. So they say, “What age?” So we get them from 13 to 80. That’s the age range. Of course, a lot of them are in their in mid 30s to late 40s. That’s the big chunk, but it’s just the Latinas. We had it actually, at the beginning, we had only from 18 and older, but then the mothers said “Wait, there’s nothing for me to take my daughter, nothing like this, so we dropped it down to 13 because we also want the young Latinas to do it, to be able to go to a nice place and have a nice lunch and just a pampering event. I think the people like me or like you that we’re in the industry and we’re always going to these galas or lunches, we kind of get tired of them. Well, most of our communities and Latinas communities actually do not get the experience. And also for the business ones, the ones that have businesses, they get to take their business and showcase their business in a beautiful place at a nice event. So that’s a little bit of what Celebrando is about.
BILL: Fanny, so it’s happening Saturday, August 2nd, right?
FANNY: Yes.
BILL: You have a new venue now, right?
FANNY: Yes. So we’re doing it at the Gaylord Pacific in Chula Vista. It’s a 1,500 room hotel. It has four pools. It’s a resort. It has the convention center and it has the meeting space. So it will be new to us and to the attendees. It’s a nice hotel. And that’s what we look for. We also look for a different experience. But we’ll have probably over 120 exhibitors also.
BILL: What type of sponsors are you hoping to attract?
FANNY: So the corporations would probably be my dream sponsors because their sponsorship actually makes it accessible for the ladies to go too. We also have a lot of ladies groups. So if I want to go and I want to go to the event and I could get another nine ladies to go with me, I become a group. So you will be treated just like the corporations. You’ll have your reserve table. You can put your name, whatever you like at the table. But we do look and we need more sponsors so it’s accessible for the ladies. We have had very good sponsors throughout the years. After the pandemic, it changed a little bit because everything changed with so many corporations. Just the corporation that wants to reach the Latina market. And I usually meet with them and tell them what the event is about and how to benefit or have more interaction with the attendees at the event. We have workshops. Also, we have financial. Right now we have U.S. Bank, who is one of our main sponsors. They’re having a workshop. We also have some Health. We have a group of doctors from Mexico that are going to come and also do a panel and a workshop. So it varies, but we want to stay with the topics. In the Health part, we target five different subjects, which is Mental Health. We do Heart Problems, Cancer, but we will have screenings for mammograms. And we will also have available screenings for pap smears because the number one killer for Latinas is actually cervical cancer. But cervical cancer is a very slow one. It’s a very slow cancer. I talk about it a lot because it’s just that we don’t get screened. So there’ll be screening for cervical cancer on site that takes 20 minutes to do it. There’s also mammograms on site. We also do Diabetes Awareness and then we do Domestic Violence also, as part of the Health part. On the Business part, we want to do basic business information. We’d love to have somebody come in and do a workshop on how to sell because a lot of the Latina entrepreneurs have a hard problem learning how to sell. But so just that we stay with the five topics and then anything else that they might want to do, then we’ll talk about and see if it fits the event.
BILL: Can you share a case study of either an attendee or a sponsor who’s come to you afterward and said, “Fanny, this changed my life. That speaker or meeting this person just changed my business and helped me grow.” Or a sponsor who said, “Wow, thank you, Fanny. This was a great event that got me to expand my brand.”
FANNY: So I’m going to give you two. One of them kind of became part of my personal life. In 2012, which was the second year, we had a lady that was 30 years old. She had pancreatic cancer. She was terminal. And I had met her. You know the story. It wasn’t me at the time. The person that was helping me coordinate Celebrando came to me and said “Hey, you know what, I think she has a really important message” And the message was that she didn’t take care of herself. She had a lot of pain. She had a lot of signs. Her body gave her a lot of signs but she never went to the doctor. So they asked her, and they figured out with her, planned it with her, and she went onto the stage and they brought these flowers, these roses. By that time it was already a thousand Latinas, so they put two dozens of roses on each side of the ballroom and they said “Hey, who wants to participate? We’re going to do an interaction, una dinámica.” And, of course, like we are, they said “Me, me, me,” and did not know what it was about. So, the ladies started. They went and got their rose and then they would have to walk onto the stage. And so then they picked her up. Her name was Alejandra. And so they showed her story. We had a video on her because she had already been in the news. She had been in El Latino. They showed her video. The Master of Ceremonies choked. It was a guy from Univision. He choked, so somebody else got the microphone and finished the story and giving her advice. And then they said, “Everybody that has a flower, just go in and say something about love. Just give her a love message.” I was not on stage. I saw the ladies kind of walking backwards because it was totally surprising. So that was probably one of the most impactful, that one. I think every year is, but I still have ladies today that tell me that totally changed their lives. You know, they went in with, where they thought it was problems. They went in not taking care of themselves, mentally, emotionally, physically, and it just totally changed their lives. Another one that we had, which was kind of interesting, is Dignity Memorial, which is the mortuary, the cemetery. They came. They were one of our sponsors. It was 2013, I believe, and I met with them after the event just to kind of do a recap on the event. And he says, “Fanny, we did really good. We sold,” — that was in June, the event — he said, ‘By December, they sold like $250,000.” He said, “but we haven’t finished our leads.” And I’m like, “What do you mean you sold $250,000?” I mean, of a business that I didn’t think was going to do well, because Latinos are not very good at planning their end of life. But they did really good. So, he told me how they did it and what they did. And I remember joking around. I said, “Do you actually have like a high season?” And he said, “Yeah, we do. We have a high season.” So also, kind of learning that part. I was really surprised. So sometimes I have like Beauty people that come and tell me, “Oh, we didn’t do good.” And I’m always thinking, OK, they did so good with such a hard business to sell, culturally. And so it’s just a matter of learning how to work the events. But those are the two that I could share with you and that I remember very clearly.
BILL: Thank you, Fanny. So I want to pivot to PR people, my audience. As you know, for almost 40 years, you’ve probably been pitched by PR people calling you up. “Fanny, did you get my press release? We have this news about this business, this product, this service. Can you give us a little coverage in El Latino?” So I just want to ask you, what tips do you have for PR people that — maybe it’s a General Market PR firm that wants to reach Hispanics with a certain product or a message? And a little bit of news coverage for their client. You know, what tips can you share about the best way to approach your editors with a story idea, a pitch, whether it’s with a press release, whether it’s just a personal phone call to the editor or to you? Any tips you can share, Fanny, would be really helpful.
FANNY: Wow. I cannot tell you how many press releases I get on a daily basis. I mean, I think we publishers are just, they’re clicking delete, delete, delete, delete. I think by sending it, you’re not really doing much. You also do have to have a relationship with the publisher. Even a phone call. I mean, today, when people call, it’s kind of weird. So I think calling is a good idea. I would recommend, calling. Also, the PR, they send the press release and then they put somebody to talk. And you can tell it’s a script. That’s terrible. Just don’t do a script. If I get on the phone, I’ll ask them a question. “Who are you trying to target?” And it’s like, “Er…I don’t know.” Sometimes I think it’s probably an intern or somebody who’s volunteering to do it. So I would just turn you guys off from doing that because publishers are getting a lot more educated about PR than they used to be. Now, don’t tell me that you’re helping me, that you’re giving me a news story because I have more news than I could publish and I have more PR than I could publish. So don’t put it like you’re doing me a favor. It’s your customer and you need to put it out. There are some that are so long. It’s so long.
BILL: The press release?
FANNY: Press releases, yeah. They’re a story. I have received some about women that are either life coaches, that are either business coaches. I’m not going to publish a press release on somebody else’s business that is just to get a sale for that person. That’s not news. That’s not content. And some of them I have to say, “Hey, here’s the Celebrando magazine. It might be interesting because that’s the market that you’re reaching. We also have the advertorials or the Sponsored Content.” So you have to know that if you’re selling something, if your customer is selling a product, that’s where it’s going to go. That’s where we’re going to kind of divide it and send it to, right? So I have dealt with almost all of them, okay, Bill? So I’ll say, “Hey, you know what? I’ll send you the Sponsored Content if you want to do it.” If it’s something about Health and it’s not actually a medicine or things like that, then maybe we will publish it as a story, but we won’t put the phrase “Sponsored Content” on it once we read it. And they’ll usually say, “No, we don’t have a budget.” Or sometimes — I think this is the most ridiculous thing that they could tell me — it’s like, I’ll send them the information and they’ll say, “Well, we don’t pay for advertising.” So, why are you calling me? Why are you sending it to me? Okay? I mean, I have had quite a few of those. You don’t even know where you’re sending it to. So also know what platform you’re sending it to. I do have some PR and they’ll probably sponsor something in Celebrando once a year. Then, when they send me stuff, then I’ll support and we support each other. And you also have to understand that we’re a business — and you know that I’m very open about my way of thinking. In a big corporation, you have the marketing person, right, you have the CMO. That guy is making a lot of money. Then you have the other marketing person, and it trickles down to like three. Then you have the PR company that is also getting paid to put it out. Then you have the volunteer or the person that is calling us, or the associate or whoever’s helping you put it out. And then you have us. And then, when you have us, everybody’s getting paid, but then you expect me to publish it for free. Why? Especially when it’s not news. It’s just you telling me about a book or sending me a PR about a book that a life coach wrote. That’s not news. That’s a profile. You have to understand what news is. So yeah, I’ll send you the information if you want to do it as a profile, because that’s what it is. You have to also understand the news. Sometimes it’s like, okay, everybody is taking a piece of the pie, but when it comes to us, you want me to do it for free when I’m the one that is delivering it to all these people. So I think not taking that in consideration is, I don’t know, it’s just not working. Some of them don’t come with pictures. If you don’t have pictures, it doesn’t make much sense for us. Or some of them, I have to go research who they are, what the press release is about. I have to find out their social media. I have to find out their links to their website and things like that. If you call me and I say, “I’m going to check it,” I will check it. I’ll go through it. If I reply to you, there’s an interest. If I don’t reply to you, there’s no interest. Now, if you call me many times with the same information and I’m telling you that it’s not something that we will publish because it’s not news, or there’s not a benefit to the reader — you have to understand — if there’s not a benefit to the reader, then I’m not going to publish it, okay? And there’s also the two platforms, because someone says they wanna see it on the print. The print has a lot less space. The online, it’s longer. You could write there forever. Not necessarily that people will read it all, but you do have more access to a lot more information. What I do with some PR that we have relationships with, I ask them to send us the two versions, the online version and the print version. Why? Because the print version does not have links. The online version will have links, so they’re already there, I don’t have to go find that.
Also, when you write it, get to the point. Get to the point at the beginning. Some of them, they’re just too long and the important stuff is at the end. With the first paragraph just write what’s more important in the press release. If it’s an event, okay, if it’s an event, sometimes they send me a press release with an event in, I don’t know, Chicago. I’m in San Diego. I’m not going to go to Chicago to cover an event. If it has to do with something for from Health or Immigration, or things like that, then we’ll reply back and say “Can you send me the photos?” because the PR has to cover it, right? So send me some photos. So things like that. But also know where the platform is, where you’re at and what coverage we have, the area.
BILL: We can do a whole course on training PR people on the right way to pitch certain newspapers in certain areas. But some of these things are just basic, I mean, keeping it short, not having an attitude like you’re doing the publisher a favor, making it multimedia.
FANNY: There’s been so many that they’re like “I’m sending you content” and it’s like, you’re doing me a favor, and I’m like, “No, you don’t understand. I have more than I could publish in the print.” And the PR will also tell me sometimes “Oh, well, that’s a different department, that’s the marketing department.” Okay, well maybe you should talk to each other, if you guys are a different department because if you send me a press release and I know it is from a company that supports me and has been supporting me, then I will most likely take a look at it and publish it. But if it’s a company that I have no relationship with, and you think you’re doing me a favor, it’s just not going to work. We used to convert it into news or follow up or look into it when it comes from a press release. But I think the press releases, they’re just getting to be so much. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I probably get like maybe 150 in one day.
BILL: 150 press releases in one day, in email?
FANNY: In the emails. So I will not take a look at it.
BILL: So that subject line has to be really good to get your attention.
FANNY: Yeah, the subject line. And also that’s why I say, you need to develop a relationship. Just like you develop a relationship with a customer, you need to develop a relationship with the publisher. I have probably like three or four PR companies that I work with that, they send it to me and, I will talk to them. And if you have different departments, like the corporation or the company has the PR and the Marketing, definitely talk to each other, because if you in the PR department know that the company supports that publisher, that is more likely that you will get it published. I mean, it is the way it is.
BILL: I really appreciate this, Fanny. This is really good insight on how a publisher and a journalist thinks when they get these press releases. So that helps us. As a wire, we’re the ones sending out a lot of press releases. So just make sure that the client understands that it’s not just sending out the press release. It’s picking up the phone and calling, making it really relevant for that audience.
FANNY: And then, Bill, also, the other thing that they always say is, “Did you see my press release?” I’m like, “No.” It’s like, sometimes, I don’t know what chair they’re sitting on, thinking that your press release popped up in my emails. Because sometimes it could go to the junk also. A lot of them are going to the junk. And also when they send a press release through Constant Contact, that’s definitely not going to work because those platforms will first send it to the junk mail before it goes into your inbox. So it’s even less likely that you will see it. And don’t make it too long. I think I will read it, I will read the first paragraph. If it doesn’t catch me, I don’t read the rest. I mean, I’m sure that you have statistics on how much time a publisher glances at your press release. And I think it’s also good to send, because if it’s something that interests me, or I think that it could be interesting to my reader — now we have Celebrando Latinas magazine, which is online, it’s more Beauty and Woman stuff — maybe I’m not going to use it in El Latino, but maybe I could use it in Celebrando Latinas or the Health part of it. And sometimes we use it in both. We use it in both platforms, the El Latino section of Health, the Salud, and then in Celebrando Latinas.
BILL: So I imagine if it’s really relevant, like say, a cervical cancer author who is telling her story and her tips for Latinas, if it was something like that, and you saw a press release about that — that seems to be a topic close to your heart — there might be an opportunity there to have them as a speaker at the event or, an article in the Celebrando Latinas magazine website. So, it’s got to be relevant and get your attention.
FANNY: Yeah, and also, it’s very important for you to have a budget for your Sponsored Content or your press releases when you actually talk to the customer. I don’t know, internally, how you guys work it, but with news and publishers, things have changed a lot. PR is not what it used to be 10 years ago. I see a lot more. And that’s not the editor’s email. That’s just my email. You have to talk to the publisher. It will be more likely that it will be published if you have a relationship with the publisher. And if it’s a product, they’re not going to do it for free. The publisher is not going to do it for free. Publishers have become knowledgeable about the Sponsored Content. There’s many different ways of doing it, but I think the most important one is, you just have to have a relationship with the publisher.
BILL: You have a lot to say on this topic. It’s so cool.
FANNY: Yeah. I mean, Bill, it’s just that I think PR forgets that publishers are businesses. I do not understand why when PR folks and corporations pay bloggers, whatever, influencers, they pay them all. But then you call me and you want me to publish your stories for free. I mean, to me, that’s an insult. I have had immigration lawyers right now from all over the country because of everything that is going on. And they send me a column about immigration law and all that stuff and I’m like “Okay, we could run the column but this is how much it would be.” It’s like, “Oh, no, we don’t pay for it.” I’m like, “Why are you sending it to me?” I have enough lawyers here in San Diego and some of them are my customers on the print advertising. Why would you think that we would publish the column for free? That’s becoming a little bit more now. I mean, immigration, I don’t know how many I’ve received in the last two or three months. But that’s a big one. And I’m just thinking, well, that’s just kind of taking advantage of the situation, of what people are going through. But they also don’t want to pay. They don’t have a budget for it. I’m sure that there’s quite a few good PR and information that we could use. But if you’re asking for the print side, it’s very hard to get in because of the amount of space.
BILL: I interviewed, about a year and a half ago, Dr. Yurina Melara. Maybe you know her. She’s from California and she wrote “The Power of Ethnic Media.” And she said what you said, that when it comes to Hispanic media or publishers, that it’s better to approach them with an ad buy. If you want coverage for a story idea, even if you only spend five hundred dollars or come at them as a business, not just as an editorial opportunity.
FANNY: Yeah. And just talking about the news and the PR, one of the other things that has grown is the organizations that are nonprofit that became news outlets. So, because they’re nonprofits, they get into all these grants, right? And they get donations. And they do coverage. But then they send us the news stories. And they want us to publish them. And some of them are really good. But I’m like, Okay, you’re getting a grant to publish about domestic violence, right? And they publish it on their website. But they’re not getting out of their website. The only people that see their website are the publishers. Or people that are within their organization. But actually, the community, the lady that is getting beat up and really needs the information, they’re not going to go to a nonprofit news organization in another state to get the information. So that’s also becoming something that has grown, especially after the pandemic. These organizations are getting good funding to talk about these topics because they’re nonprofit. And then they come to us and they say, “Hey, this is a really good article. Here’s the article. It’s written in Spanish and English.” I mean, it’s a beautiful article because they have the funds to hire reporters and have them develop the articles, but then they’re sending it to us and we did — for many years — but we did not understand how it worked. A lot of the publishers did it for many years. Now they don’t, even though it’s good information, they will not publish it because we know that they’re getting paid, but we’re not getting paid. But then they need us to get the information out to the community because they know that they’re not out in the community. They know because they got the grant to cover this information, but they’re not getting the information out to the community. So that’s also something that has been happening especially after the pandemic.
BILL: Fanny, let me see if i understand you’re saying: There’s this new crop of nonprofits that are getting grants to produce content, I guess to do content marketing for certain issues. They’re doing sort of activism in a way with these articles. And then they want distribution through, in this case, Hispanic publishers. They got paid to write the article. They got paid through the grant for salaries, whatever, but they’re not able to purchase an ad buy on the media. They just want free distribution on the media.
FANNY: Correct. Yeah. Those are like news. They all talk about immigration, health. Issues. I mean, issues that are happening and they are nonprofit and they’re grants, and they get grants to do that. I do have one, a friend of mine, that she received one. She got one for domestic violence. She does a column on domestic violence once a month with five or six newspapers in California. It’s a really well-written article. She’s doing it with us and she’s publishing it with us. But a lot of them, I have to tell you, there’s like four or five, maybe six in California that are really pushing it out, which they got a lot of funding. But a lot of the publishers don’t even know that it’s funding that they got. And that’s why they’re sending you this article. And they have to, because they’re non-profits and it’s a program, they have to show how many people they impacted with that campaign or with that grant. And we become part of those numbers when it gets published with us. And I think now the publishers are becoming a little bit more knowledgeable about that practice, the way it works.
BILL: Thank you, Fanny. Fanny, this is like the longest interview I’ve ever done. It’s two hours. Two sort of wrap-up questions. I really appreciate your time, Fanny. Thank you. I wanted to ask you about your leadership. I mean, clearly, you’re very influential in the industry. You have a lot of leadership wisdom to share. I always love asking anyone that I interview about leadership tips. In this case, any wisdom you can share for journalists who are thinking of launching their own newspaper, journalists that want to create their own blog, or a marketing professional that wants to launch their own agency. You’ve launched many businesses already. Any tips that you can share for 2025?
FANNY: First of all, get a mentor. Whatever you’re going to do, get a mentor. I know that there’s a lot of information on the internet. I know that we could Google a lot of information. But there’s nothing like the human person-to-person to help you navigate the first years. I would say also just trust your instincts. Many years back, probably some of the biggest mistakes that I made was when I did not trust my instincts. When I believed that the other person maybe had more experience or more knowledge of what I wanted to do. And I went with their advice. I think follow your instinct because not everybody’s in the same boat. You know, when you have a mentor, you’ll get and you’ll ask for the information that you need. And be very, very clear about what you want in terms of information. Don’t tippy toe around asking the question. Just be very straightforward. As a woman, I would say don’t get burned out. It’s very easy for us to get burned out with so many things that we have. I did this video last week on social media — that I’m trying to be more on social media — and it was the 8-8 Rule. You know, and it’s something that I’m working on, trying to implement, practicing it. But that’s also very important. And also, when it comes to a business, I did not dream of having a newspaper. I did not dream of becoming a marketer. That wasn’t part of my goals in life or my dream, but it was something that came and it was an opportunity and I took it. So always look at what comes to you as an opportunity and then you decide to take it or not. But when you decide to take it, then you have to understand also the consequences of taking it, with your time, your health, your family, all that. As a woman and as a Latina, I’ve been asked this question before, it’s like, did I run into obstacles or discrimination or things like that? I don’t know if I did. I probably did. But I was so busy trying to keep the business going that that was not my focus. I have never really had a Business Plan, but I always had a Sales Plan. And I think that’s important. But also, sell with a purpose. My purpose is my reader and making sure that we serve them. And also, know who you work for. I work for me and I work for my reader. Also, when you’re going to start a business, I think I learned it from the Japanese, the way the Japanese do the business. They’re not thinking of becoming instant millionaires. They plan ahead. So I have tried to learn to plan ahead. And I think I have become a pretty good salesperson. I studied. I read it. I watched videos. I practiced. And I have a goal in mind. You cannot have any business just for a passion. You have to have sales. And I think that happens to a lot of Latinas, especially because we’re one of the fastest-growing in having businesses, but also about 60 percent of Latinas close their businesses within the first three years. The reason is because a lot of us do it for a passion. And I think that’s just not the way it works. If you start a business, I tell the ladies from Celebrando, it’s good to have a passion in what you do, but you also have to know about accounting. You have to know a little bit about law. You have to know about employees. You have to know the payroll. So you have to learn a little bit about everything. You don’t have to do everything, but you have to know a little bit about the different departments of your business. So I think, when a lot of that gets into it, it’s like overwhelming. Like, OK, no, I don’t want to deal with employees. I don’t want to deal with this. So that’s why you have to know what you’re getting yourself into. I was talking to one of my sons yesterday about business, and I said, “Having your own business, it has its pros and its cons. You know, you are going to work a lot, but you could also take off whenever you want. But when you have to work, you’ll spend 12 hours working.” Do it. I mean definitely, if you want to start a business, I would say do it. Don’t hesitate.” Also, business people, you have to be a risk-taker If you’re not a risk-taker, it is very hard for you to be in business because you will take a lot of risk. Once you have your business, become the best employee of your business. I have seen and I have known people that have worked for somebody else in a company and then they got their own business and they were the laziest employees of their their own business, right? I’m like, “No, you have to become the best employee of your business and the best salesperson of your business because even though you will have other people doing sales for you, you are the face of it. Those are probably the advice as to starting a new business.
BILL: Fanny, so yeah, when you mentioned the long-term business planning, I had a mentor one time who used to work for Panasonic in the ‘80s and he said they had like a a 200-year Business Plan. It was like a really long-term vision for the company. And there was one question that ties into this that I forgot to ask you earlier, which is about impreMedia. Back in 2006 — I remember those days clearly — impreMedia was a new company that was acquiring Hispanic newspapers, La Opinion in Los Angeles, El Diario-La Prensa in New York, La Raza in Chicago. And I believe they approached you at the time to be be their San Diego company. And they were growing fast. That must have been really tempting for you, but you declined. So you were talking about trusting your gut. Tell me about that. And why did you decline? And looking back now — because then the recession hit — do you feel like you made the right decision?
FANNY: Yeah, definitely. I made the right decision. That’s a decision I don’t regret. It was very tempting. It was very tempting. I declined because we went through the process. You know, we talked about it, went through the process. We went through the numbers. And I remember the gentleman that, he was Canadian, and the gentleman that I was talking to, he said to me…
BILL: John Paton?
FANNY: Yeah, John.
BILL: I remember him.
FANNY: And he said to me, “Fanny, I don’t think you really want to sell.” And I said, “John, I just know that you guys or whoever, whatever’s going to end up with it, you guys will close it. Because there were also — a lot of them at the time — there were some that were being bought or constantly merging them with other ones. They were just closing them. And I remember, I don’t remember which one it was, but there was a couple of other newspapers that were bought and then they were closing. And I just felt like I couldn’t close it. And I didn’t also want to be squished out. I didn’t want it to become a skeleton, a skeleton or a sandwich, as I call them. So a lot of the publications, not only by them, but by other companies that were being bought, they were being sandwiches, I call them. So they had all the inserts and they had like four pages of information, most of it national, and they were just using it as a sandwich. I felt that it would just die. And I really didn’t think that there was probably enough money to let — knowingly, knowingly — that it was very likely that they would close it and, possibly merge it with another one. I just didn’t feel it. So I declined. It was very tempting. And I don’t regret it because a lot of the publications at the time were being squished. Le sacaban todo. They didn’t have any local reporters. They centralized the information, like in Miami or New York. So it wasn’t what I wanted for El Latino at the time. Many times before that, probably when I was going through a lot of hardship financially and I was tired, and I wanted to quit. I was like, “Who’s going to give this information to the community?” Or, you know, las señoras who they’re looking for work or a small shop, a mom-and-pop shop that we’re helping or the new lawyer. So I always had that in my mind. So I never quit. I felt like if I had sold it, it would be closed. So that’s why I didn’t do it.
BILL: That was your gut, what your gut was telling you?
FANNY: Yeah. And also that, when I talked to John, John said, “You just…” — because they also wanted somebody that was like “Yeah, I’m done with it,” you know, that type of thing. And I was not done with it. And also that if I stayed for a little while, I would not be able to — you know, I have never worked for anybody since I’ve been 21 — so I didn’t know how it was to have to report to someone or make reports. It was either, buy me out totally or not, but I think they wanted me to stay a certain amount of years. And I would not know how to navigate that. But they were not the only ones. The U-T also happened a couple of times too. And it just did not work out.
BILL: U-T wanted to acquire you?
FANNY: Yes.
BILL: Got it. Fanny, one last question. Thank you for your time. Okay, so just more of a family/personal question. I know that you have three biological sons, and then you adopted three daughters. Do any of your six children, have they shown an interest in taking the helm of Latina & Associates moving forward? I’d love to hear the story from you of how you adopted these three girls. It’s a very heartwarming story.
FANNY: So I mentioned her. Her name was Alejandra [Maria Alejandra Salgado], the mother. And I mentioned it in Celebrando. She’s the one that they put on the stage and gave advice. So that’s her, Alejandra. I knew about her story through El Latino because one of the reporters did a story on her. By the third time, she had pancreatic cancer. 30 years old. Mexican from Guerrero. And she didn’t have any family. And so her name kind of started coming around through different venues, through the stories and also through Celebrando. And one day I said, okay, well, let me go. I’m going to go. She came to this office because they were going to do a third report for donations for her to have chemo. She was also undocumented. She came to the office and I was there. I had just come from a lunch and I saw her. It was kind of interesting because I had been thinking about her, but I was avoiding going to see her because I just didn’t want to get involved. And I was really busy. So when she came into the office, I saw her and I went to the conference room and actually met her in person. And I said, “So, what do you want? What do you want to do?” And she says, “I don’t want any more chemo. I just want to be with my girls. I only have a little bit of time and I’m very sick all the time.” And so that’s how we met. And I went to go see her that Saturday to her house. She had the three little girls. The girls were one, two, and five years old. And, we started talking and we had a lot in common. She came to the States with an aunt at the age of 13. She stayed with the aunt for a while. Her aunt threw her out. We had very similar lives.
BILL: Wow.
FANNY: But the thing is that she came undocumented. I came with papers and adopted. We talked, we connected, and then, just to make the story shorter, she passed away three months after. People think that she was my family, or that she was a friend. I met her three months before she passed away. And in that time, both of us decided that the girls would stay with me. So then that’s how I got three more. So, I have six. And the girls right now, they’re teenagers. They’re 14, 15, and 18. And they’re really good girls. You know, they’re part of the family. The boys are older. The boys are 21, 25, and 27. So, that’s how I met her, but she comes through knowing her through El Latino. One of the reporters did a story on her. That’s how I have six.
BILL: Congrats. And have any of them shown interest in the publishing industry or the event industry?
FANNY: No. From a very young age, I have made an effort for my kids to be independent, do whatever they wanted to do in life. And right now, none of them. I think maybe as they get older, I think they haven’t shown interest on the publishing side, but they have shown an interest on the entrepreneurship and having their own business, which I think that’s great. But no, so far, no, but I still have two more to go, the two little ones. And I also think it’s because they have seen me work so much, like the first many years, they see how much I work and how many events I had to go to and all that. So I think that’s been a discouragement for them.
BILL: Okay. Fanny, for like the next interview, we’ll talk about social media and AI.
FANNY: Okay.
BILL: Any final thoughts, your goals for the next couple of years, any reminders about Celebrando?
FANNY: Yeah. So if you can get involved with Celebrando or any of your customers can get involved with Celebrando, it’s totally available. You can reach me through the social media, www.celebrandolatinas.com, El Latino San Diego. My goals — I will probably have to have another interview for the goals — but right now I just really want to work on the platforms and probably work on Celebrando a little bit more, just because it’s such a big need with the ladies. We’d love to do something for the guys but that’s another story. Right now, there’s a big need for Latinas, especially Latinas in business and in mental health. So if you have anybody that would love to participate or wants to reach that market, this is the opportunity. We do it once a year only. And we’re expecting probably a thousand Latinas this year. It’s a great event. There’s a lot to it. Once you get in there, there’s nothing to compare it with. And just reach out to me. You can reach out to me via the social media, via El Latino, and I’m also Fanny Miller on Instagram or Facebook. Just reach out. However I could help you, whatever advice I could give, and if you’re thinking of becoming a publisher, let me know. We could maybe make you part of Latina Publishers. Reach out. And if I don’t answer you the first time, you just have to be persistent, just like any business. Good luck to all of you guys. And thank you for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.
BILL: Likewise Fanny. Thank you for your time and all your wisdom and your stories. I really appreciate it.
FANNY: Thank you, Bill.
BILL: Bye.
FANNY: See you soon, in person.
BILL: Good luck with the event.