Stephens Media Buys La Prensa
by March 31, 2003 12:00 am 143 views
Stephens Media Group of Little Rock bought Springdale’s La Prensa Del Noroeste de Arkansas (“The Press of Northwest Arkansas”) from Eddie Vega on March 17. Vega established La Prensa in 1998. The Spanish-language weekly reaches about 10,000 readers in Northwest Arkansas, southwest Missouri and northeast Oklahoma.
Tom Stallbaumer, publisher of Stephens’ The Morning News of Springdale, said little will change with the sale of La Prensa, which has been printed by The Morning News “for years.”
“We can easily expand pages or add color,” Stallbaumer said of La Prensa, which usually has about 28 pages per issue. “For a small businessman like Eddie, when he adds pages or color, that adds to his printing bill, but that’s just an incremental cost for us.”
“We have been working on this for the past seven or eight months,” Vega said.
Stallbaumer said buying La Prensa will help Stephens Media reach the area’s Hispanic community. La Prensa’s two editorial employees will probably begin working from The Morning News newsroom within the next three months, he added.
As publisher of La Prensa, Vega will continue to work from a building he owns in Springdale. Vega will also continue to run his company, EZ Spanish Media, which operates Aztlan Promotions and two Spanish-language radio stations, KREZ, 99.5 FM (“La Zeta”), and KZAR, 1390 AM, which broadcasts the Radio Unica Network.
Stallbaumer said the advertising rates for La Prensa will remain the same. Open ad rates are from $355 for one-eighth of a page to $1,800 for a full-page monthly (based on four issues per month).
Since La Prensa is circulated for free, it isn’t audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Stallbaumer said this is the second Spanish-language newspaper that Stephens has purchased. The other is El Tiempo Libre, the largest Hispanic newspaper in Las Vegas.
Stephens owns 12 daily newspapers, including three in Arkansas. The company also owns 11 weekly newspapers in Arkansas besides La Prensa.