• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 25, 2011

In recognition of the growing size and influence of the U.S. Hispanic population, the newspaper industry this morning will introduce a new national network that will offer marketers a one-stop buy for reaching consumers in Spanish-language daily and weekly newspapers. The new service, the NNN Hispanic Network, is a new division of the newspaper industry's Newspaper National Network, and is the first set up to explicitly target and package newspapers buys for a multicultural segment of the U.S. population.

"We serve all multicultural markets, but this is different because we haven't put this level of resources against a specific multicultural market before," explains Jason Klein, president-CEO of the NNN.

To head the new division, Klein tapped Mike Cano, a long-time Hispanic media sales executive who had been vice president-business development and partnerships for La Opinion, publisher of La Raza, and president-CO of Impacto USA, before joining the NNN as director of Hispanic media.

Klein said the new Hispanic network includes most of the leading Hispanic newspapers, which tend to be clustered in the major U.S. markets, and generally are operated by the same big general market newspaper publishers that are among the NNN's top members.

Klein said the timing of the rollout couldn't be better, because the 2010 U.S. Census revealed strong growth and consumer spending power among Hispanic Americans. He said the main target for the Hispanic network is advertising budgets currently earmarked for local Spanish-language TV stations, and that digital media isn't yet a significant factor for Hispanic advertising budgets among major U.S. marketers.

Klein said the NNN would continue to package advertising buys targeted at other multicultural segments, but does not currently have plans for spinning off any other new divisions to focus on them.