In an effort to stay on top of an ever more competitive Hispanic media market, People en Español  is taking a page—a few pages, actually—from one of its most successful Time Inc. sisters: celebrity fashion magazine InStyle.
     The four-year-old Spanish language People Weekly spin-off is beefing up its fashion and beauty coverage with a pair of new departments and a round of appointments.
    At the same time the magazine is taking steps to bolster its entertainment coverage by creating the position of entertainment editor and opening an office in Mexico City—moves that will help it to fend off a new rival, American Media’s biweekly Mira.
     New permanent fashion sections "Lo Ultimo" ("The Latest") and "Pasarela" ("The Runway") have been introduced over the last several issues, and on Friday, the magazine named two new fashion and beauty writers: Ursula Carranza, formerly a People en Español  staff reporter, and Isis Artze, previously a freelancer for a number of Latin titles.
     "We are really trying to mirror InStyle magazine," says Lisa Quiroz, publisher of the 10-times-yearly magazine.
    It’s no wonder. One of the most successful launches of the 1990s, the fashion/celebrity hybrid will finish second only to Vogue this year among monthly women’s magazines in total advertising pages, with 2,850.62 to Vogue’s 3,017.76, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. InStyle’s formula has provided inspiration to, among others, Us Weekly, which made sure to include a generous back-of-the-book fashions-of-the-stars package when it relaunched last March.
    For People en Español , leaning on the fashion and beauty button is an especially shrewd move, with studies showing Hispanic women are disproportionately avid buyers of cosmetics. 
   The increase in style and grooming editorial strengthens the magazine’s claim on apparel and cosmetics advertising dollars—a point that is not lost on Quiroz, who notes that People en Español ’s fashion and beauty pages are up 25 percent so far this year.
     Overall, ad pages in the magazine were up 37 percent, to 603.0 through November of 2000, according to PIB.
     Year to date ad revenue totaled $14.5 million, a 59.4 percent increase over the same period in 1999.
    Paid circulation for the title was up 11.5 percent to 326,614 in the first six months of 2000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Single copy sales, which make up more than a third of the magazine’s circulation, slipped 9.3 percent from the previous year, a development that Quiroz attributes to industry-wide newsstand softness.
    "I think the same environmental issues have been affecting all the titles on the newsstands," Quiroz says. "The subscription side of our circulation is way beyond what we expected two years ago."
    With the approval of the America Online-Time Warner merger going through, Quiroz says she expects AOL Latin America to prove a major boon to People en Español ’s subscriber rolls. Time Inc. revealed last fall that it had already sold more than half a million subscriptions online through AOL.
     People en Español  is the country’s largest Spanish-language magazine, but in Mira it may soon have a rival for that title. 
   Launched last May with a newsstand-only distribution of 100,000, the entertainment-based tabloid already has a circulation in excess of 200,000. 
    Its parent company, American Media, publishes the 2.1 million-circulation National Enquirer, making it one of the few companies that can go head-to-head with Time Inc. on newsstands.
    But Quiroz says People en Español  competes less against Mira than it does against two other Spanish-language entertainment magazines, TV y Novelas, a sort of Spanish Soap Opera Digest, and Vanidades, which has extensive coverage of fashion and celebs. 
    The two biweeklies from Editorial Televisa International have a combined circulation of over 200,000.

© 2001 Media Life