Spain's top newspaper targets Latin America

By Jason Webb and Robert Hetz

MADRID, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Spain's leading newspaper El Pais has set its sights on Latin America, where its print edition will act as an advance guard in a market to be won ultimately via the Internet, the head of media group Prisa (PRS.MC) said.

"What this is about is having a global editorial point of view, about not feeling ourselves to be a Spanish newspaper but an Ibero-American newspaper," said Juan Luis Cebrian, Prisa's chief executive officer, told Reuters an interview late on Tuesday.

El Pais already prints a Latin American edition in Buenos Aires and Mexico City, but will expand distribution in the region to coincide with a major redesign of the paper to include more colour and a clearer reporting style, as of next Sunday.

"We're studying starting daily distribution in Colombia and in Miami, and we're already distributing daily in Brazil," Cebrian said.

The objective is not to compete with established local dailies in Spanish-speaking markets, one of which, Colombia's El Tiempo, Prisa recently offered to buy. Instead, El Pais wants to capture an educated elite of the sort won over by The Economist in that magazine's transformation from a British to a world-wide publication.

"El Pais is a peculiar case, as it already has a lot of influence among Latin America's political and economic elites," said Cebrian.

"What we want is to broaden out to other sectors of society, and use our print edition to build our global brand on the Internet," he said.

In the past, Cebrian has said that if he had to found a newspaper now, he wouldn't bother with print but would put it entirely on the Web. But this wasn't an option this time, considering the established position of El Pais in Spain, where its weekday circulation of about 400,000 is the largest of any general subject daily newspaper bar the free titles.

NEW COMPETITION

But competition is growing in an already crowded newspaper market, which has just been joined by Publico, a title trying to muscle in on El Pais's centre-left readership, although with a slightly less cerebral approach.

El Pais's circulation fell by 7 percent in the first quarter, but has since recovered slightly although Cebrian said Prisa's target for a 2 percent rise over the year may prove tough.

"I still have hopes of getting close to that 2 percent, although maybe it won't be 2 percent but 1.5-1.8 percent," he said, adding that third-quarter sales had exceeded the same period of last year.

"It will depend to a great degree on how the paper sells after the relaunch."

While Cebrian sees the future on the Web, there is still a long way to go. El Pais is read by about 700,000 or 800,000 people each day via the Internet, compared with 2 million estimated readers for the print edition.