Good morning/afternoon. My name is Camilo Gomez and I am here to talk to you about a service I’m building called “News in Spanish.”

“News in Spanish” is a service that helps people practice the language with tidbits of news stories that they can relate to.

This is my newsletter. It starts with a short, digestible news item: a tweet about an event in a Spanish speaking country. It is followed by an explanation in English, to contextualize the tweet, as well as a translation. There are two links to the story, one in Spanish and one in English. Finally, in the “notes” section, I explain a grammar point, an idiom, or subtleties in the vocabulary employed.

I have been sending it out from Monday to Friday for the past two months. Since I began, the number of people on my mailing list has quintupled. This, and the exchanges I’ve had with people getting the newsletter, has proven to me that there exists a demand for a product with the aforementioned characteristics.

According to a 2014 report from Instituto Cervantes, “El español: una lengua viva,” there are more than 7.8 million learners of Spanish in the U.S. More than 2.8 million of these learners are adults (non college students). This is my target audience.

How am I going to make money with this? Now that I have begun to build an audience with the newsletter, I can start offering and charging for products based on the premise of learning a language with the news. I have thought of two: the first would be audio files that users can download; the second, online tutorials. A third source of revenue would be to place advertisements for language schools and institutions.

So, why am I doing this? I am a journalist, a native Spanish speaker, and an avid learner of languages. I have noticed that often, people think that they can’t consume news in a foreign language unless they have a high level of fluency. Actually, you don’t need to be perfectly fluent in a language to start consuming the news. Other than expanding your vocabulary, you will also learn about the culture and current affairs of the places where that language is spoken.

My next steps in this journey will be: to develop the audio product and tutorials; to look for partnerships with sponsors; and, to seek partnerships with Spanish teachers and institutions that could promote or buy my services.

If you would like to take a look at previous examples of my newsletter, you can visit the archive at the site www.newsinspanish.strikingly.com. There, you can also sign up for the newsletter.

News in Spanish is also on Twitter. The handle is @EditorNIS. If you wish to contact me, send me an email at nis.editor@gmail.com. Thank you.