The Associated Press will be delivering local news stories from six Latin American newspapers across its AP Mobile news network through a content distribution deal with Grupo de Diarios América (GDA). Regional newspapers added to its network include: El Tiempo (Colombia), La Nación (Costa Rica), El Comercio (Ecuador), El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico), El País (Uruguay), and El Nacional (Venezuela).

AP first entered the international market last year with the launch of French and English language versions of The Canadian Press Mobile. Following that, the AP Mobile team developed AP Mobile en Español featuring U.S. Spanish language news in two versions - as a dedicated news category channel for the AP Mobile iPhone application and as a standalone application available for download on BlackBerry App World.

The point of the initiative to serve up content to both local and international audiences. The Spanish-language push, though, is most likely to appeal to this duel-group, given the large Spanish-speaking population in the U.S.

Telemundo is making a similar play with its recent rollout of a Spanish language news app using software from LSN Mobile.

Publishers are forging ahead with these initiatives despite - or perhaps in the hopes of reviving - a stagnant Hispanic mobile advertising network, according to Portada.

In general, complexity is a big drawback when targeting this market - there are too many platforms, too many browsers, and too many markup languages to make mobile marketing easily scalable, it said.

"From an advertiser's point of view, this is a production nightmare." The recession only made the situation worse. But as smartphones and new apps become more common among this demographic, these barriers are likely to come down, it concludes.