Several people have asked me in the past: What parent company owns AL DÍA? 

Meaning, which news corporation pays your rent, your salaries, or your seemingly costly operation.

In other words, who owns your stock and, as a consequence, runs your destiny.

"We do," we answer.

"Really?" the countenance facing us reads, sometimes without need of the accompanying audible word.

Yes. Really! Why not?

No big deal, by the way....

AL DÍA is just the result of the old-fashioned, entrepreneurial tradition in America of 'building from scratch,' and, as in the golden age of American journalism, with a family name validating the whole journalistic enterprise.

We take pride in the fact that Pennsylvania, where AL DÍA was born, is one of the few states of the nation in which the tradition of family-owned media survives, with new generations of the same family still controlling local journalism enterprises, giving to them both purpose and legitimacy.

AL DÍA News Media is, modestly, one of them.

A corporation born in Pennsylvania 20 years ago, in September 1994, in a moment in which a community need luckily met the individual determination of the founder.

The truth of the matter is that in 1994, nobody will bet one cent on the Philadelphia Hispanic market, much less in a Latino media operation in our city.

However, the way I saw it, there was a community starving for a better reflection of who they were via media. Positive images of Latinos were non-existent, and the occasional references were outright insulting.

Hispanic radio stations, Spanish-language TV stations, and that bunch of community newspapers that came, and often went belly up, happened after the AL DÍA experiment was born in the living room of the North Philadelphia home of its stubborn founder.

Taking advantage of my training as a professional journalist, forced by unemployment despite my two journalism degrees and almost five years of newsroom experience, I started typing on a personal computer MAC SE, model 1990 (see the picture below, preserved in our "AL DÍA Museum") I had brought from graduate school.

These were to be the first sentences in a long and unexpected road: of writing paragraph upon paragraph, filling out copy in the ever-growing number of blank spaces left on the newspaper pages by the few advertisers.

Even more challenging  — as I wasn't a trained MBA —  it was managing all kind of personalities among associates and clients, and dealing with bankers with no mercy and strict accountants with one deadly deadline: April 15th.

That extra capacity acquired in "the school of hard knocks" gave us, finally, the right, and also the privilege and the responsibility, to own an enterprise that now, thanks to the wisdom and resilience of the core staff and the longevity and endurance acquired slowly but surely through this decades long toil, is now positioned to grow, full of obvious potential.

AL DÍA News media is, by the way, a direct product of the evolution of the Philadelphia media market in which so much has happened over the past two decades.

AL DÍA as a corporation — distinct from those that have been sold, traded or closed — is on its way to a natural adulthood.

AL DÍA happens to be in the middle of a dynamic growth after becoming, during the past several years, an innovation hub for young professionals looking to develop or consolidate their careers in our city, involved in one of the sectors which will experience guaranteed growth during the next 10 years: Latino News Media. Not only here in Philadelphia, but all over the country.

However, in 1994, when the Hispanic market and Hispanic media wasn't as fashionable, I was just a premature example of an "entrepreneurial journalist," way before the expression was coined and became a subject of teaching and study in the now transformed schools of journalism.

Today we feel extremely grateful to Philadelphia and those many readers, clients and friends who have lent their critical support over the past 20 years.

We take full pride on the fact that AL DÍA is made totally "from scratch" and, yes, "Philadelphia Made!"

Hernán Guaracao is the Founder & Chairman of the AL DÍA Foundation, and the Founder & CEO of AL DÍA News Media, Philadelphia's premier Latino News Media.