The Low-Balling of Spanish-Language Reporters

When Liliana Soto started her journalism career with Univision, she thought her only option was to pursue work in Spanish-language news. A college professor she admired told her to stick to reporting in Spanish because of her accent, Soto explained recently at an Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce event.

“After that talk, I became very self-conscious about how I sounded,” she said.

The self-doubt lingered, even after winning several Emmys for her investigative reporting. On top of this, she was not fairly compensated for all the work she was doing in Spanish. “Journalists working in Spanish news make way less than journalists working in English news,” Soto said in her speech at “The Power of the Purse” chamber of commerce event on March 3.

Soto’s experience is backed by recent research. In a study conducted by Fundamedios with support from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellowship, the organization interviewed 115 journalists and looked at pay studies from several newsrooms. “The most common claim expressed was about differences in their working conditions or contracts. Latino journalists do the same job as their white peers with fewer resources, and less pay,” the study found.

Dagmar Thiel, CEO of Fundamedios, an organization that works in Latin America and the U.S. to promote freedom of expression, explained how some corporations rationalize lower pay. “People who work for Telemundo,” Thiel said as an example, “they’re absolutely conscious that they get paid less than their peers at NBC, and what normally management tells them is that Telemundo has less advertisement, or the advertisement that is placed in Telemundo is worth less than on NBC, so you are paid according to the channel you are working.”

If NBCUniversal, which owns both Telemundo and NBC, was committed to pay equity, they would figure out a way to add up their revenue and pay their reporters equally, Thiel said.

Pay inequity issues aren't exclusive to television news. The One Herald Guild, which represents the Miami Herald and its Spanish-language counterpart El Nuevo Herald, is working to negotiate wages that will fix longtime pay inequities.

“In Miami, I think it's so obvious how valuable Spanish-language journalism is that no one disputes the importance and the professionalism and the value that journalism has,” said Joey Flechas, co-chair of the One Herald Guild. “Unfortunately those are words. And words don't pay the bills. That kind of sentiment can be expressed by management and the company but it needs to manifest in the form of compensation.”

Since organizing in 2019, the guild has been able to move the needle on some key demands, including a wage floor and a wage percentage increase, Flechas said. Still, after two years of negotiations, the McClatchy Company, owner of the Herald papers, has yet to propose a contract that meaningfully addresses pay inequities, he said.

Since Flechas started at the Herald, he's seen the two newsrooms come together, break down barriers and work more collaboratively, translating stories between English and Spanish. “A key part of bolstering that unity is to pay people equitably,” Flechas said. "That has to be a part of the equation.”

For Soto and so many others, pay has lagged far behind the workload. At Univision, Soto, in an interview with IDAR/E, said that she made $40,000 a year as a multimedia journalist, where she anchored on weekends, did all her reporting and editing without a photographer, and sometimes produced the Sunday night newscast. A journalist doing all of this at an English news station would make about $70,000, she added.

So when her two-year contract was about to expire and they offered her a renewal, Soto was surprised to see it didn’t come with a raise. She then asked for a $20,000 increase, to which she said her boss responded “‘Well, Lily, this is not Fox10,’” referring to the local station in Phoenix.

While her boss alluded to supposedly limited resources, Soto later found out a male coworker was offered a $5,000 raise with his contract renewal. This strengthened her resolve to sign a contract with a raise, she said.

After the network refused to give her an increase, “not even a penny more,” Soto walked away from the job.

The grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side

The move from Spanish to English-language news is an uphill battle. And it doesn’t eliminate pay inequities for Latinas.

Nora López, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, said the association has heard from members that their experience as a reporter in Spanish-language newsrooms doesn’t count. “That includes investigative journalists who tell us that recruiters don't even bother reading their portfolios and honestly don't even consider it valid if it’s not in English,” López said.

On pay inequities, Fundamedios, after looking at several newsroom studies, including from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, found that these reviews are not very transparent on racial/ethnic breakdowns. But most of these examinations found significant pay gaps, with women and non-white workers making less and white men making more.

The Post’s 2019 study, which offered the most transparent racial breakdown, found that a Latina earns $30,000 less a year than a white man on average, according to the Fundamedios report.

Fundamedios has published a toolkit about the pay gap to bring awareness to the issue.

Still, while awareness of how structural racism, sexism and accent discrimination play out in salaries is critical, it’s not the fundamental solution for closing this gap. “There needs to be a change in management and the managers and people in leadership need to defend their journalists and defend the value of them when negotiating salaries,” Thiel said, emphasizing that the burden should not be on Latinas to navigate these issues but instead for newsrooms to transform.

“There needs to be a change in management and the managers and people in leadership need to defend their journalists”

Soto learned that working above and beyond would not guarantee fair pay. In 2019, she took an off-air job at ABC15 in Phoenix as a specialty producer, helping with logistics in investigative units. She made more money there than she had as an on-air talent in Spanish news.

Within a year, she was promoted to be an on-air investigative reporter. This was during the pandemic, and after Soto saw several journalists lose their jobs because funding was tight, she didn’t ask for a raise or a change in contract with her promotion.

“I was afraid and I didn't ask. Because you know, I think it's also part of our culture, as Latinos we are afraid to ask to get paid more,” Soto said. “And I remember thinking, if I ask if they're gonna pay me more, they're gonna say, ‘well never mind’ and then I'm going to lose my opportunity.”

She did what she’d always done—performed extra work. Soto offered to translate her stories to Spanish because they were heavily focused on Latino communities and she wanted the stories to reach Spanish-dominant Latinos. The station created a Spanish-language website within ABC15, called “Estamos Contigo.” The website is still active today, with advertisements up and Soto’s last story dated Dec. 17, 2021.

Soto again worked often without a photographer, edited 95% of her own stories and even helped colleagues with their stories, she said. She won the station a Rocky Mountain Emmy for a bilingual investigative report—a first for them.

“I was doing all that thinking, you know, there's gonna be a point where they're gonna see how valuable I am,” she said “I'm helping that station to break into a demographic that every English news station wants.”

Despite all of her hard work, an offer for a raise never came, said Soto, who is currently the assistant director of bilingual journalism at the University of Arizona School of Journalism.

López encourages reporters to not be afraid to negotiate and talk about the skills they bring. “Being bilingual is a specific added value and it's to be treated as such and to be compensated as such.”

Thiel emphasized the importance of having Latinx decision-makers at news organizations.

“Latinos who get to leadership positions have the responsibility to look out for others and that's why representation matters,” Thiel said. “This is also an important factor and the lack of representation of Latinos, Asians, Black people, and Indigenous people in news organizations and the difficulties they have to access leadership positions is also very important. If you have more [diverse] people in leadership, you will probably be able to have more equity.”