Bilingual strategies on news media production in the post-digital age

Latinx media has been part of the American news media landscape for more than two centuries. As media reflects demography, the changes in the audience directly influence their production and consumption practices. Since the foundation of the first Spanish-language print newspaper, El Mississippí, in 1808, to the launching of Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language daily stream of news to subscribers on WhatsApp, Facebook, and other social media platforms in May 2020, not only have more than two hundred years passed, but also there have been a series of transformations in the digital and social media world. However, both examples show how news media ventures seek to meet the information needs of the communities they serve. Latinx media become translators in the diasporic transnational mediatic environment moving back and forth through bilingual practices when reporting and disseminating relevant information for its diverse audiences. By addressing preliminary findings of a larger research project that seeks to map digital-native Latinx media in the United States (Retis & Cueva Chacón, 2021), in this chapter we examine bilingual strategies in news media production in the post-digital era (Cramer, 2015). We present a survey of the diverse practices of bilingualism implemented by Latinx media since the advent of the Internet, and, more specifically, during the last decade. We evaluate and extend the framework proposed by Lewis (2008) that categorized bilingual journalism under three forms: production, content, and tailored bilingualism, while paying attention to new opportunities for bilingualism afforded by new media (i.e., social media, text messaging apps).