Friday, Feb. 18, 1966
Sparks & Machete Blows
All the police knew was that the murderer had appeared to be a young Puerto Rican. They had no other clues to the man who stabbed Arthur Collins in the New York subway last October and sprinted away. Even so, a reporter from Manhattan's Spanish-language newspaper El Diario soon picked up the suspect's trail. Following a telephone tip, Esli Gonzalez, 34, went from bar to bar in The Bronx. Finally he found the fugitive, but the man got away again. Next night, Gonzalez tracked the man down for the second time and persuaded him to give himself up.
Once more, El Diario had made the news as well as reported it. It splashed the story on its front page-as did most of the New York press. El Diario lets very little news of the city's 730,000-member Puerto Rican community escape its attention; in turn, it is read loyally by the city's Puerto Ricans. In the past 31 years, its circulation has spurted 25% to 75,850, and its profits have doubled.
Sadism & Social News. A tabloid that almost always runs a picture of some battered, bruised or bloodied Puerto Rican on its front page, as well as several sex-and-sadism stories inside, El Diario also carries social news from New York and San Juan. It runs Drew Pearson and Victor Riesel, translated into Spanish, and U.P.I, and A.P. copy on Latin America, along with several columns of chitchat entitled "Chispa-zos" (Sparks), "Machetazos" (Machete Blows) and "Consultorio Sentimental" (Advice to the Lovelorn). Its uncompromising editorials, written in both English and Spanish, champion causes dear to its readers: a civilian review board for the police department; a crackdown on slumlords, credit gouging and labor racketeering.
El Diario firmly believes it has a duty to promote the welfare of Puerto Ricans, and it goes about the job unceasingly. The paper's 50-man, largely Puerto Rican editorial staff spends half its time listening to readers' complaints of mistreatment. A converted city bus owned by the paper roams Puerto Rican neighborhoods soliciting other tales of trouble. Puerto Ricans who are accused of a crime often surrender to the paper simply because they are afraid of going to the police. "Saying you're from El Diario is like flashing a badge," says Editor Sergio Santelices.
At Odds Over Bobby. Much of the credit for the paper's verve belongs to its publisher, O. Roy Chalk, 58, who bought it from a Dominican expatriate in 1962. Though he runs a vast business empire that includes the Washington, D.C. Transit System, Trans Caribbean Airways and some choice parcels of New York real estate, Chalk devotes a minimum of one full day a week to his paper, and he writes many of its editorials. On the day after the New York power failure last November, it was on Chalk's order that El Diario ran a black front page with the white words: POR QUE? (Why?)
Chalk is now beginning to get some competition from a second Spanish-language tabloid, El Tiempo, which changed from a weekly to a daily last October. Edited by Stanley Ross, 52, a controversial Latin American hand who put out El Diario from 1955 until 1963 when he broke with Chalk, El Tiempo carries more news about Latin America than El Diario and less about New York. It is aimed at New York's non-Puerto Rican Latin Americans-Cubans, Dominicans, Colombians-who are currently streaming into the city, while the Puerto Rican migration has slowed to a bare trickle. El Tiempo also makes a point of hiring celebrities. Enrique Negron, the Bronx grocer who saved a policeman from a howling mob
(TIME, Jan. 28), is now assistant circulation manager. Jose Torres, the light-heavyweight boxing champion, tutored by his good friend Novelist Norman Mailer, turns out a thrice-weekly column of political and social comment.
With such backers as F. Ruben Batista, son of the former Cuban dictator, General Anastasio Somoza Jr., army chief in Nicaragua, Huntington Hartford and Realtor Paul Tishman, El Tiempo takes a more conservative political line than El Diario, which is so ardently Democratic that it would not identify a prominent local Republican when he appeared in a picture.
When Bobby Kennedy ran for Senator in 1964, El Diario plastered pictures of him all over the paper and editorialized: "They say that you own a house in Virginia and that you vote in Massachusetts. But we know better than that. You are a real New Yorker, born in The Bronx." Last month, after Kennedy had made his swing around Latin America, El Tiempo's Juan Casanova said in his gossip column, "Off the Record": "When he arrived in Caracas, at the Hotel Tamanaco, Kennedy took his own liquor to the pool, not buying in the local bars. Thus, he created enemies in Latin America."
Expanding to Spain. El Tiempo is still having trouble getting advertising, and expects to lose at least $150,000 before it begins to break even. El Diario, on the other hand, is moving into a larger building this month; more up-to-date presses will enable it to increase its pages from 48 to 60 or more. Encouraged by his New York success, Roy Chalk is now considering starting other editions of El Diario in Miami or Los Angeles. And after a cordial interview with General Francisco Franco last month, he has made some plans to found a highbrow El Diario, devoted largely to business news, in Spain.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.