Julian Posada

President

As a Founder and President of Café Media LLC, Julian oversees the vision and strategy of the company. Julian previously served as General Manager of Hoy, Chicago’s only Spanish-language daily newspaper. He was instrumental in its launch and, subsequently, in the launch of Hoy L.A.

Julian currently serves on the boards of directors of the Academy for Urban School Leadership, the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago, Public Allies and the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, among other boards and committees of organizations that serve the Latino community in Chicago.

Julian holds an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.S. in Food Systems, Economics and Management from Michigan State University. He is a McCormick Tribune Media Fellow (2006) and winner of Presstime’s 20 under 40 (2007). In 2007, he was selected by Chicago United as a Business Leader of Color.

Alejandro Riera

Editor in Chief

Alejandro Riera has been active in Chicago's Hispanic media since 1988, when he and a group of independent producers launched "Orgullo Latino", a weekly  news magazine series in the Chicago Access Network.

Alejandro joined ¡Éxito!, the Chicago Tribune’s Spanish-language weekly, as a full-time reporter in 1995. There, he wrote about entertainment and culture, covering local and national theater, music, film and television –with the occasional foray into politics. During that time, he was a frequent contributor to the Chicago Tribune's Tempo, Arts & Entertainment and Friday sections.

In Sept. 2003, Alejandro was involved in the transition of ¡Éxito! into Hoy, a daily newspaper. He was promoted to Senior Editor for Vida Hoy and Special Sections in Oct. 2004. There, he oversaw the transformation of Vida Hoy in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York from a weekend entertainment guide to a 5-day-a-week entertainment/lifestyle section. He also directed the re-launch of Fin de Semana, Hoy's weekend consumer-oriented publication.

Alejandro won the prestigious Peter Lisagor Award in 2000 for "Cuando los tambores callaron," a story that chronicled local reaction to Tito Puente's surprising death.

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Managing Editor

Gina Santana has approximately 10 years of experience in the areas of strategic brand planning, marketing and consumer insights, with emphasis on the general market, as well as the fast-growing U.S. Latino consumer population. She has worked for Leo Burnett USA as a Senior Planner, and as Research Director for Leo Burnett Colombia.

Melissa Martinez

Marketing Director

As a Founder and Marketing Director for Café Media LLC, Melissa Martinez directs the marketing, events, communications and circulation strategy of the company. Previously, Melissa worked as a Publicist for the CBS Television Network, where she used her skills in public relations, media relations and communications to rapidly transition from her position at CBS 2 Chicago to the national CBS network. She began her career in the marketing department of Tribune-owned ¡Éxito! weekly newspaper, and later helped launch Hoy, the only Spanish-language daily newspaper in Chicago.

David Murga

Sales Director

As Founder and Sales Director, David is responsible for coordinating all sales efforts for Café Media LLC. Prior to Café, David held the position of Midwest Sales Director for Latina Magazine, where he developed a 10-state territory to deliver an annual average increase of 30 percent in net revenue. Previously, he had been Director of Public Relations at the National Museum of Mexican Art, where he exponentially increased both attendance and media coverage.

alBerto Treviño

Art Director

As Founder and Art Director, alBerto oversees the creative vision of the company. Going beyond the look and feel of the magazine, Web site and newsletter, he brings creative insight to the voice and tone of Café Media.

He has over 15 years experience in visual design, photography and artistic creativity with an urban Latino cultural edge. alBerto has done creative work for Fortune 500 companies, such as Sara Lee, McDonalds, TAP Pharmaceuticals, Accenture, and spent five years at Tribune Company, where he worked with ¡Exito!/Hoy and RedEye.

Marilia Gutierrez

Managing Editor

Marilia has been involved in journalism since 1988 when, as an aspiring news translator, she stepped into the busy newsroom of El Nuevo Dia, the largest newspaper in her native Puerto Rico. It was love at first sight. Having spent half her career her native country and the other half in the U.S., half in Spanish and half in English, half in print and half online, Marilia fully embraces the duality of the Latino cultural experience in the U.S. She has also worked for the Chicago Tribune Internet edition, Reflejos Bilingual Newspaper and Hoy.

Mañana
Chicago Reader
October 23, 2008
By Michael Miner

A former general manager of Hoy bets on a new magazine for next-generation Chicago Latinos.

Hoy is a Spanish-language daily newspaper whose staff, former general manager Julian Posada tells me, conducts its meetings in English. That might strike you as ironic, but all it means is that Hoy is created for a market—Chicago’s unacculturated Latinos—its creators don’t happen to be part of.

Posada grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, the son of a neurosurgeon and a nurse from Colombia. He’s married to Gina Santana, whose blue-collar parents came to Chicago from Puerto Rico. Santana says she can’t imagine a newspaper or magazine that would have satisfied all four parents. But she and Posada were born and educated here, have master’s degrees, and share a strong if diffused sense of Hispanic culture. To test their theory that Latinos like themselves, a generation or two removed from the old country, would value and support a publication of their own, they’ve just started one.

Café bills itself as a “Latino lifestyle magazine,” and the first issue came off the presses last week. It’s a free bimonthly that the founders hope will go monthly next spring.
There’s an argot particular to new publications courting advertisers, and Café publicity indulges in it. The magazine announces it “will deliver culturally relevant content, generated for Latinos living in the Chicago area. It reflects the richness and duality of Chicago’s contemporary Hispanic community.” Its readers will be inspired “to live the richest life possible, both at home and in the workplace; to relish the infinite cultural offerings of our great city and suburbs; and to continually learn about topics that matter to them and their extended families.”

The interesting word in all that is duality. During a conversation in their northwest-side home, Posada and Santana described three sets of Latinos, and two will not be Café ’s market. The largest is the Hoy audience, the smallest the Latino “elite,” and each, they acknowledge, is a group with concerns about fitting in. Café is targeting the “middle band”—acculturated but not assimilated Latinos, comfortable in their American skin but determined to remember where they’re from. “We’re fiercely proud of our cultural heritage,” Posada explains.

The language of Café is English—though not entirely. When only a Spanish idiom will do, it’s used. For instance, the last page of the magazine is reserved for stories readers want to share about cultural lessons learned as children. The page is headed “A mi me enseñaron . . . ”—a familiar phrase that according to Santana means figuratively, but not literally, “When I was growing up.”

Posada calls Spanish his “first language,” and he says it was “brutally important” to his parents that their children know it. “A son of theirs had better speak Spanish. To them, Spanish was still the native language.” Whenever his parents took the family back to Colombia, “you’d better speak the native language.”

Will Posada’s two children hold Spanish in the same regard? “You hope for that,” he says. “I can tell you, the five-year-old,” the older of his kids, “gets it. He knows if he speaks to me in English he’s not going to get his way. He’ll get his way when he speaks to me in Spanish.”

But Posada admits that English is the language he knows better. His Spanish is fine for conversation, but in his East Lansing schools he studied only English grammar and read only books in English. He waves at his bookshelf and admits “95 percent, maybe 98 percent” of the books there are in English. Even the ones originally written in Spanish. Even One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombia’s greatest writer, Gabriel García Márquez.  “My mom told me, ‘You should read it in Spanish.’ I said, ‘Yeah, mom. I know.’” But Posada has tried to read it as Márquez wrote it, and it was a slog.

There’s the duality—thinking Spanish in English—and Posada believes it defines such specific multitudes that he can offer them to advertisers. According to Café literature, there are some 1.8 million Latinos in metro Chicago, of whom 260,000 use Spanish and English equally; 404,000 are bilingual but prefer English and 241,000 are “English dependent.” From this pool, Café seeks a target reader who’s 34 or younger with a college education and a household income of at least $75,000 a year.

The press run for the first issue was 45,000 copies; 20,000 were mailed to Latino households as an inducement to subscribe and the rest were distributed in public places—banks and hospitals in particular. About 30 percent of the total distribution was suburban, with a focus on Latino concentrations in western suburbs such as Aurora and Elgin.

In May Posada resigned from the Tribune Company, which publishes Hoy. His title at Café is publisher. Santana, whose background is in marketing and whose resume includes a stint at Leo Burnett, is managing editor. The editor is Alejandro Riera, a former senior editor of Hoy.

“I didn’t think there would be a huge recession,” says Posada. “But on the flip side, I’ve been pleasantly pleased by finding a silver lining in this. There is massive displacement in media. We’re very young and new, but I think we might be able to figure out a way to take advantage of that. You can challenge the status quo in times like this because people are looking for unique ways of getting to an audience, and at the end of the day we’re a niche publication.”
 
Its success may hinge on the strength of Posada and Santana’s assumptions. One of them is that language disappears more quickly than culture, and that what Santana calls the “slow erosion” of culture is something even Latinos who have lost their Spanish want to resist. Another is that cultural differences that fundamentally divide immigrants—say, Colombians from Puerto Ricans—diminish to bridgeable “nuances” in subsequent generations. A third is that there are cultural fundamentals all Latinos share, such as a commitment to the extended family.

That commitment, says Posada, will be Café ’s point of entry when it eventually writes about illegal immigration. It’s a subject he believes hasn’t “been written about and explained the way we want to do it,” yet he isn’t actually sure how the magazine wants to do it. He observes that Spanish-language television can report on “a raid here, a raid there” to an audience that wonders, will I be next? But Café ’s readers don’t wonder that. Posada says, “It’s kind of a quiet issue for people who aren’t worried themselves about being in the crosshairs.”

But he can easily imagine Café readers whose children’s school friends have undocumented parents. Whose grandparents—or even parents—have problems with documents they never got around to resolving. (Posada’s own mother, who came to the U.S. legally and has lived here for decades, became a citizen just a few years ago.) Those problems “could have a huge impact” on health care, Posada says. “If you’re legal you feel you can go get preventive care.” But if it’s your parents’ health that worries you, “you think ‘Oh my God, can I take them in? Because they’re going to ask for papers.’ Which is very different from ‘Oh my God, I don’t have papers.’”  

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/hottype/081023/

Former GM of Hoy launches U.S. Hispanic lifestyle magazine
chicagotribune.com
Tribune staff report

2:14 PM CDT, October 17, 2008

Café Media this month has launched Café, a new lifestyle magazine targeting second- and third-generation Hispanics living in the United States.

Initial circulation will be 45,000 copies throughout the Chicago area. Subscriptions are free and available through the magazine's Web site, www.cafemagazine.com.

The first three issues will be bi-monthly but Café plans to go monthly in April. The Web site complements the magazine, as does an e-newsletter.

"This is an incredible opportunity for me to showcase the Latino community in a unique manner," Julian Posada, founder and president of Café Media, said in a statement. "The complexity of the Latino community will be explored in all angles."

Posada was formerly general manager of Tribune Co.'s Spanish-language newspaper in Chicago, Hoy. Tribune Co. also owns the Chicago Tribune.

Copyright © 2008, Chicago Tribune

www.chicagotribune.com/business/chicago-hoy-cafepress-oct17,0,7272508.story

Café Media Launches Café Magazine
Portada
October 14, 2008

Café Media, LLC has announced the launch of Café magazine, a Latino Lifestyle magazine in English. Inspired by the growing second and third generation Hispanic population in the United States, Café magazine hopes to reach English-dominant readers by providing original content grounded in their cultural values and interests.

The first issue, October/November 2008, will have a circulation of 45,000 copies and will be distributed throughout the Chicagoland area beginning October 1st. “Distribution will be: 20,000 home-delivered through USPS, and 25, 000 through public distribution, through beauty salons, hospitals and retail locations.

Café’s Julian Posada tells Portada, “Café is essentially a media company, consisting of four platforms: Magazine, website, newsletter and events. So our real vision is to focus on relevant content first and platform second.” Posada adds that they’ll be integrating mobile distribution in Q1 of next year.

To further complement the new magazine's launch, Café Media will also simultaneously debut an e-newsletter and a website. Special features of the e-newsletter will include “Editor’s Picks” on upcoming events, along with tips on going green in the “Que Verde Corner.” In addition, the website (www.cafemagazine.com) will premiere with an exclusive blog partnership with Irene Tostado of Univision Radio’s La Kalle 93.5 & 103.1 FM.

Café Media is a Chicago-based multi-platform media company focused on providing culturally relevant content to English-dominant Hispanics designed to inform, inspire and entertain. Its media offerings include multiple platforms including e-newsletters, web, mobile and event driven activities.

Advertisers will include: Verizon, Diageo, American Family, National City and Harris Bank.

A Cafecito... And A New Venture
Hispanic Market Weekly
October 13, 2008

Five months after leaving Hoy Chicago, Julián Posada has launched a new Hispanic- focused venture, Café Media. It’s first serving: Café magazine.

The English-language publication targets acculturated Latinos in the Chicagoland area. Debuting with the October/November issue, Café will keep a bi-monthly schedule for its first three issues and switch to a monthly format in April 2009, explains Posada, formerly general manager of Hoy Chicago.

“We’re going to explore the complexity of the Latino community but with a different structure, moving away from the rules and bureaucracy of corporate America,” says Posada.

The free distribution magazine will deliver 20,000 copies to subscribers and homes in high-density Hispanic ZIP codes. Another 25,000 will be distributed in hospitals, universities, beauty salons and doctors' offices throughout the DMA. Already 2,000 Chicago residents registered for the free subscription to Café, notes Posada.

On the editorial side, the focus is on identifying what the target audience finds relevant and delivering that information, Posada explains. To do so, Café Media created three advisory panels – on finance, education and family/wellness – that meet regularly with readers as well as business and community leaders to identify issues of importance for Hispanics.

“If we’re talking about the banking industry or bankruptcy, we want to know what’s relevant to second- and third-generation Latinos or how best to address the issue,” says Posada. “We’re trying to engage our readers from the beginning with relevant content.”

The magazine’s editorial staff consists of an editor-in-chief, two managing editors and a team of freelance reporters. Contributors include Michael Puente, from WBEZFM 91.5 Chicago Public Radio, and Rafael Romo, former anchor at Univision’s WGBO-Channel 66 in Chicago-born.

Café’s premiere issue features an interview and photo shoot with Chicago-born actor, Freddy Rodriguez, who has starred in ABC’s “Ugly Betty” and HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” Also in the magazine is an eightpage spread on “Día de los Muertos,” the Mexican holiday that honors deceased loved ones.

Posada points out that that the vision behind Café Media is a “platform agnostic” media company that focuses primarily on content and relevance.

Debuting alongside the magazine are an e-newsletter – which includes “Editor’s Picks” on upcoming events and tips on going green in the “Que Verde Corner” - and a companion website. Already in development are a mobile platform and an event platform.

The magazine is modeled after Tu Ciudad, a bi-monthly English-language magazine targeting acculturated Latinos in Los Angeles, that ceased operations with its June/July issue (HMW Archives 6/22/08. The City Sleeps). Executives at Emmis Publishing attributed the decision to a lack of "commercial viability."

“Tu Cuidad was a good idea and had a good model,” says Posada. “They were on the right track and would have succeeded if they’d been given more time.”

On the advertising front, Café has lined up Diageo, National City Bank, Verizon, Harris Bank, Comcast and several universities in the Chicago area. The first issue boasts 20 ads. David Murga, formerly the Midwest advertising director of Latina magazine, is handling ad sales at Café.

Café’s debut comes amidst a national economic crisis, one that’s hitting magazines especially hard. After nearly three years of double-digit growth, ad pages are on a downward slide and dollars are barely staying above flat year-over-year growth.

Despite the bleak industry-wide outlook, Posada remains optimistic.

“At the end of the day it’s highly risky; you can even call it crazy,” says Posada. “But even without people knowing the product we were able to round up 20 advertisers and deliver an 84-page book.”