By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post Staff Writer
 
The Wall Street Journal will produce a weekly, tabloid-sized Spanish-language insert for the Tribune Co.'s Hoy newspapers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, reflecting the growing clout of the Hispanic media market.

The insert will appear on Thursdays under the Journal banner and focus on personal finance and technology, careers and small business. Articles will be culled from the Journal's American, European and Asian editions and translated into Spanish by Journal editors, said Dow Jones & Co., parent company of the Journal.

Hoy also will have access to well-known Journal columnists, such as political writers Alan Murray and John Harwood and personal-technology guru Walter Mossberg. Hoy will pay for the content, but terms were not disclosed.

"Hoy's commitment to its readers is to provide news and information on matters that are important to Hispanics in the United States," Louis Sito, Tribune publishing vice president/Hispanic media, said in a statement.

Tribune, which publishes the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and 10 other papers and owns 26 television stations, launched the Spanish-language Hoy in New York in 1998, and expanded to Chicago last year. It plans to launch a Los Angeles edition in March.

The Journal publishes a weekly section for the Washington Hispanic and provides daily pages for Latin American newspapers.

"We are excited to serve this growing and important Spanish-language market and are pleased to be working with the dynamic Hoy newspaper group," said William E. Casey Jr., vice president/special editions of the Wall Street Journal.

Hispanics make up the nation's largest minority, with about 13 percent of the population. Marketers and demographers have compared the segment to the baby boom generation -- a fast-growing group with increasing spending power and political clout, each of which is predicted to continue expanding.

Last month, Los Angeles's La Opinion merged with New York's La Prensa/El Diario, mating the nation's largest and oldest Spanish-language newspapers and laying the foundation for a new newspaper chain, as the combined company, Impremedia LLC, promised to begin buying other papers.

Jose I. Lozano, vice chairman of Impremedia, said La Opinion had considered partnering with the Journal but decided to stay with its own Los Angeles-based business
writers to emphasize local businesses in its pages rather than print the Journal's national and international coverage.

The aim is "to help support and nurture the entrepreneurial vigor that exists in our Latino communities by providing small-business people information that was relevant to
the growth and development of their own enterprises," Lozano wrote in an e-mail.

                                               © 2004