The Pew Research Center released its annual State of the News Media report for 2015. One fact struck me that I haven’t seen otherwise commented on elsewhere: only 30 Spanish-language radio stations in the US air news and talk programming, out of more than 500 Spanish-language format stations total. That’s seems really low to me.

What isn’t clear from Pew’s Hispanic Media Fact Sheet is whether those 30 stations are exclusively news/talk formatted or if they are counting music stations that also air a little bit of news, even if only during drive-time (the former is most likely, as I’ll explain). Still, at just 6% of all Spanish stations, the percentage that are news/talk still seems low.

I guessed that across the board news/talk stations account for more than 6% of all radio in the US. To make that comparison let’s just assume those 30 Spanish-language stations are news/talk formatted, not music stations that feature some music. Separately, Pew counts a total of 1,990 news/talk formatted stations in the US, out of 15,442 full power radio stations. That means 13% of all stations in the US are news/talk formatted. More.

See: Radio Survivor

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.