WOW..! Where the heck did the time go..?!!!
It feels like it was a couple of years ago, when I was just getting out of my life-changing personal chaos that I had back in 2003, and began to get motivated to start this venture…. WOW!
Now this venture has grown so much, that I don’t even know how it got like this..! From a small 24-page Black-and-White regional newsletter just distributed in the city of Syracuse, to a full-featured Media Consortium that publishes a large-format 32-page color state newspaper distributed between Albany & Rochester AND Oswego & Binghamton, that produces two weekly “Spanish” radio shows, that provides professional Translation Services, that serves as a Ethnic-oriented Marketing & Advertising agency, and that maintains and host a very popular Latino website portal.
There is no enough time or space to write my thoughts and “editorial feelings” about this eight-year anniversary, and no convincing words to really see the core of my experience and emotions, but I can place some sentences of communication and lines of personal sharing, that might (or might not) be of your interest.
This venture was both exciting and dynamic, but also challenging and demanding, going through good and enjoyable times, but also passing by some frustrating and difficult moments. The economy and other personal issues affected the smooth and continuous growth of this business, and the overall sales declined in the publishing business, forced me to make some drastic changes in the development of CNY Latino, that delayed other projects and plans I had in mind, to implement. However, those projects and plans are not forgotten nor eliminated… there are just temporarily put aside… until things get better, and profits start to pick up.
There were many experiences and aspects during this venture, that have surprised me because of their existence and how (some of them) happened, that are both good and not-so good, and that I felt it was worthy to mention, but I will only bring a few that I think are needed to bring out; for instance, the least interesting might probably be that the fact that “creating a newspaper is easy… maintain it and keeping it alive is the difficult part”… no, I am not sharing this with our readers, hoping you feel “sorry about me” (are you..?), but to accentuate what some have tried to convince me, with respect to changes and improvements for this periodical (and, I am going to leave it like that). I also wanted to share something else I discovered during the development and dealing of this project, something that many know in our Latino community (and some outside this community that don’t know) of how divided and quietly antagonistic our local Latino community is… again, not enough time or space to elaborate this, but interesting enough for our readers to think about it (and, I am going to leave it like that).
Again… I don’t have the room and the time to place in this personal editorial, my thanks to those many that helped me and contributed with this newspaper; however, I need to mention the incredible support and unconditional patience that my Editor in Chief has provided throughout all these years, to the point that without this Latina, this could not be possible and would not be happening, and for that I need to publicly and proudly thank my partner in business and in life, the second mother of my daughters and the second value of my life, Marisol Hernandez, for all the involvement and participation she has had in this project, and in my life. I also should mention the patience and understanding that my daughters have indirectly kept with me, while putting up with my tied schedule and sometimes tirefull and “cranky attitude”, during the hard times of work that sometimes I had to do in my home with them.
And of course, I have to also thank the advertisers and readers of this publication, that without either one of them will make this venture, one with a failing end.
Hoping to celebrate more years in the upcoming future, and to share with many, the hopeful success of “our newspaper”…
