The Latino Newsletter’s 2025 Winter Updates

While I count the hours until Daylight Savings Time begins again, a sign that winter is nearly behind us, I wanted to take a moment to provide a Saturday afternoon startup update on where The Latino Newsletter is in 2025.

These are two operational wins:

• We are just $650 from hitting the 2025 $4,000 Winter Pledge Drive.

• Thanks to a Thursday morning donation from the Latino Donor Collaborative, we are now at 69% of our 2025 fundraising target of $20,000.

Considering we started the year without any foundational funding, our subscribers, donors, and supporters are keeping the lights on at The Latino Newsletter right now.

Thank you! ¡Gracias!

That means the world to us and inspires us to keep going.

It takes $800 a month in operating costs, excluding my part-time salary, to run The Latino Newsletter. It would be great to close the $650 gap this weekend (donate here), but to keep us running as is for all of 2025, we need to hit the full $20,000 baseline goal.

April looks like a critical and exciting month for TLN. We hope to share good news then. When I founded this outlet in 2024, I promised myself a year, and that doesn’t happen until June.

So, we are still in the game.

And the prospects look extremely bright.

While we can’t start the second season of our podcast right now, we are still working to raise enough funding (estimated at $20,000 a year) to sustain the work of my producer, Joaquin Cotler, and myself for a second season, which would be around 10-15 episodes. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, we would be disappointed, but it’s totally cool.

As long as we hit our initial $20,000 2025 non-podcast goal, The Latino Newsletter can still exist solely in newsletter, web, and social forms. All those areas are trending up.

Here are the latest data points, all achieved organically through online community building and a consistent editorial schedule that will celebrate its 40th week on Monday:

• Newsletter: 1,101 active subscribers, 136,265 impressions, 66.2% open rate, 4.3% click-through rate (Source: Beehiiv)

• LinkedIn Newsletter: 1,140 subscribers, 46,833 article views (Source: LinkedIn stats)

• Total Stories Published: 204

• Total Podcast Episodes Produced: 28

• Web Traffic: 50,000+ views, 95,000+ search impressions, 4,260 search clicks, 7% average click-through rate (Source: Google Analytics and Google Search Console)

• Social Media: 15,163 (Source: Total from Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube)

In addition, we didn't immediately choose to have our stories syndicated through MSN, but once we agreed to it, we have begun to see some fantastic early progress and engagement there. We are actively exploring additional syndication opportunities.

And I know this might sound like a small thing, but to us, it is not: we earned enough ad money this month to fully pay for our Beehiiv hosting account, which right now is $120/month for premium services. (Sidenote: The $120 fee is well worth it.)

We will take that.

Our Board Meeting

Last Monday, The Latino Newsletter held its first board meeting of 2025, during which we formally voted on our strategic plan.

These are some of the 2025 goals we have identified:

• Ensure The Latino Newsletter is a platform where high-quality reporting, thought-provoking commentary, and voices thrive, reflecting the rich complexity of Latino experiences.

• Produce a second season of our podcast.

• Launch a local San Juan bureau with one editor and one correspondent to cover the island’s local news and cultural landscape.

• Continue empowering young journalists in Massachusetts through hands-on training, internships, and opportunities to publish impactful stories.

• Partner with local news outlets to establish new community beats for the Greater Boston area.

The mood was one of hope and determination, and we all agreed to keep pushing forward.

In the meantime, thank you all for making The Latino Newsletter an impactful nonprofit media outlet in such a short time.

We still have some heavy lifting left to do, and we might not get there, but the wonderful words of support and encouragement from our community are keeping us going.

Seguimos.

Julio

About the Author

Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder and publisher of The Latino Newsletter.