Manufacturing Executives in Mexico Stay Informed

American manufacturing executives that are living in Mexico have no problem keeping track of what's going back home. Internet sites, cable and satellite TV, inexpensive phone calls (or free, with VOIP services) keep the expatriate as up-to-the-moment as if they were in a Des Moines living room.

The real challenge for American personnel in charge of Mexican manufacturing operations is knowing what's going on down the block, in the host state and in the rest of Mexico.

It will help if the executive in Mexico has a reading command of Spanish. Newspapers and broadcast media, as in the U.S., have websites that complement their print and airwave products. Individuals can prepare themselves prior to arriving in Mexico by examining a list of radio and television sites. (There are several other websites that also offer search functions for media by states and the by cities.)

Very few of these resources offer any news in English, but for those that can read Spanish they can prove to be quite useful. There are many publications that are available in English throughout Mexico -- especially trade journals and real estate guides -- but most are promotional in nature. Most regions with a permanent American or Canadian population have weekly or biweekly paper. Among them are: The Guadalajara Reporter, the Vallarta Tribune and Riviera Nayarit, and Rocky Point (Sonora) Times.

Easily the best and most thorough of English-language publications in Mexico is The News, published by MAC Ediciones y Publicaciones S.A. de C.V. Print edition of the paper is available in most large cities and tourist areas in the country.

Most cities have one or two daily papers and four or five weeklies. Mexico City, Tijuana, Monterrey and Guadalajara have several times that number. For the Spanish speaker, excellent national coverage is available from websites such as CNN Mexico, others offer great sports coverage. Mexico City's newspapers El Universal and Excelsior may be read in their entirety. Those wishing to read two of Mexico's finest papers, Reforma and El North will find they need to pay for access. An excellent source for commentary is the website of Proceso magazine.

It is unlikely that these resources, national and state, will still give a reader the information that, say, might be provided a resident of the Los Angeles area by Orange County Register or Los Angeles Times. Those papers have created regional inserts and subsites to their main domains that cover school board meetings, high school sports and local races. Few Mexican papers have followed these initiatives because, if online advertising on websites is only marginally profitable at US media sites, it has not yet approached the ponit where media entrepreneurs are willing to invest in covering "hyper-local" news.

One of the major sources of news in English throughout Mexico comes from language schools, private and state-run, where people get together to speak the language. The classroom setting is often the venue for swapping stories about daily life and several universities publish English-language blogs or magazines that cover both the university and local communities.