About this site – We (Hispanics & the nation) need to be informed – I make it easy

The 5 Steps to Help Our Community & Nation

Mission

My mission is: Engage and Empower Hispanics. Nurture Leaders. Help Hispanics and the Nation. Basically, I want to empower you by engaging you with relevant and comprehensive Hispanic and Latino news in the most useful, efficient and stimulating formats.

Curation Leads the Way

To do this, I have redefined Hispanic and Latino news through a powerful system of curation(?) that I have built and refined over 8 years. I scour the web collecting news and then organize and present it here and in news summaries. My unique style of curation is the best way to get a picture of what is going on as it brings together the news from a wide variety of sites ranging from big media companies to small blogs. It puts all of this news in one place resulting in a relevant and comprehensive service that saves you time while empowering you with knowledge you would otherwise need to spend hours gathering yourself.

10,000 Leaders Campaign (200x50)

However, if not enough people are actively learning and empowering themselves here then I feel that I am failing at my mission. You are important! There is a great need for what I do here but there is also a great need for leaders (like you!). We need understanding and appreciation of our diverse and changing communities not only for the communities themselves but for this great nation. So I am launching an attention and engagement campaign with a goal of:

10,000 newsletter subscribers,
10,000 daily visitors to the site and
10,000 social media followers (5,000 Twitter followers and 5,000 Facebook likes).

I am calling this the "10,000 Campaign." As I see it, that would only be an average of 200 people per state: 200x50=10,000!

33.5 million Hispanics speak only English or are bilingual and speak English well.

Rub your eyes and read that again. 33.5 million Hispanics speak English or are bilingual. They are spread out around the country, in every state and probably in almost every community. Yet this diverse group representing millions of votes and dollars (in terms of purchasing power) have few ways of staying informed in English about issues that are important to them. I would even say that many would have a hard time imagining what relevant news in English would look like as many have never been exposed to it.

I keep hearing that knowledge is power. Who wouldn’t agree that education is essential to the improvement of one’s life and one’s role in society? Corporations and government give money to education because of this. Yet there are surprisingly large (and seemingly invisible) holes in the education and knowledge that not only affects Hispanics (or Latinos or Chicanos – use your word and be proud) but the entire nation as well.

I am talking about the fact that national Hispanic news, as I refer to it, almost does not exist. I am talking about a systemic lack of access to useful, organized, timely and relevant information for, from and about Hispanics from around the country in English.

Without good information about issues that are important and relevant to who we are, how can we make sound decisions when it comes time to vote or buy something? How can we increase our power in order to help ourselves and this nation? How can we inform non-Hispanics about us and our issues? How can we celebrate who we are for all to see?

I seek to tackle this problem head-on. Before HispanicTips.com, news about Hispanics was out there but it was scattered and not easily accessible to everyone. I strongly believe that this situation, this lack of accessibility, hinders both the Hispanic community and the nation economically, politically and culturally. So I made it my goal to provide easy access to Hispanic news so that people could stay informed.

In pursuing this goal over the past two years I have, on an almost daily basis, handpicked, collected and organized over 45,000 posts. HispanicTips.com serves as both a living archive of Hispanic news and information, as well as being the best way to stay informed on a regular basis. Essential news and a daily email newsletter reaches informed Hispanics with news spanning every state in the union and covering a variety of subjects like business, politics, entertainment, and immigration.

Readers have let me know what they think of HispanicTips.com saying: ‘love it,’ ‘addictive,’ ‘informative,’ ‘helpful,’ ‘useful,’ ‘great,’ and ‘invaluable.’”

If knowledge is power then I am sorry to say that the power of millions Hispanics has not yet been realized to the detriment of all.”

Gracias, Tomás

My name is Tomás (bio). I am your host to and creator of this useful tool/website/blog/resource. HispanicTips is an aggregation service bringing together news and info from around the nation (we are here, there and everywhere). This news is for, from and about Hispanics and Latinos that I personally handpick (40 to 100 a day) from a variety of sources and present to you in ways that make it easy to stay informed. I strive to deliver relevant and comprehensive news on a daily basis for free. The best of this news and info, I call Essential Headlines. This site is my crowning creative achievement and I present it to you, in hopes that you as well as others may learn – so that we as a community, as a nation, may stay informed.HispanicTips serves three distinct purposes

Daily Hispanic and Latino news that is comprehensive, relevant and easily accessible
An information archive for Hispanic life in US

It is easy to get overloaded with information in today’s world. HispanicTips strives to present a lot of information but alleviate the ‘overload’ by presenting headlines and/or excerpts of the news or information with quick links back to the originating article and machine translations of the article. To better serve these purposes, HispanicTips presents these excerpts in a variety of ways:

Essential Headlines with direct links are found on the homepage
A daily newsletter,
RSS feeds are available for all categories and tags with easy links to add to your favorite feed readers
Subject and Geographic organization – quickly view by category, state/territory (can’t forget Puerto Rico) or metro area in the menu above or check out the sitemap

Before HispanicTips, there was no single place to easily stay informed on a daily basis about Hispanic/Latino news from around the country especiallly in English. That was the reason HispanicTips came into existence, to fill a void and a need. At first it was my need but it quickly became apparent that other people also sought this type of news and information. This is news for and about you, me, our families and friends as well as an important and growing segment of our country’s population.

Traditional media simply cannot cover all of the news that we might find of interest. Even Spanish language TV can’t cover the majority of what is covered here because of time limitations and because they have to cover mainstream news. The majority of stories come from regional, subject-specific or local publications and press releases..

HispanicTips actually grew out of two other sites of mine that are still functional but now archived. Ticias.com and LatinMusicNews.com both covered latin music news and are part of the HispanicTips package as they combined have over 11,000 posts capturing well over a year’s worth of news. Both of these site provided the foundation for me to build/create the system I now use here with HispanicTips.

Three years have passed since I started HispanicTips on July 3rd of 2005. Looking back and at where the site is today, I am amazed by all that I have accomplished. I have faced ups and downs and have happily come through them all to find myself today in a place of calm, daily adding to this amazing resource and daily helping people stay informed and educated about Hispanics.

Now you may ask why don’t I post the full article like you may see on other blogs. The answer is that there are copyright laws that prevent me from doing so. Some day the blogs out there that simply copy and paste entire articles are going to get into trouble. That is why I post only an excerpt (except for press releases). The owners of these articles own the copyright and I respect that. That is why I always provide a link to the article. It is up the owner to determine if the article has gone to paid archives or is still there for the reading.

I have four principle beliefs regarding the web:

A website is a tool. It is either useful or not.
All websites revolve around people and the information, communication and relationships between them
The web is not an option.
That everything we do should help people.

Please also check out the highlights page if you haven’t already done so.

I wrote this for the New Year 2007.

We, like you, are a diverse group of human beings.
We, like you, are essential to this country and planet.
We aren’t just here or there, we are everywhere.
There are 44.3 million of us living in the US.
That is 14% of this country’s population and by 2050, that number will jump to almost 25%.
We already are 20% of Americans aged 34 and younger.
60% of us aren’t immigrants at all. We were born here.
We are the fastest-growing segment of the electorate nationwide.
Our combined purchasing power will soon top $1 trillion.
Some of us only speak English, some only Spanish, but many use both to varying degrees.
Immigration is a complex issue that needs to be intelligently addressed on a national level.
We, like you, are a diverse group of human beings.
We, like you, are essential to this country and planet.

Gracias, Tomás