As you may or may not know The Costa Rica Star, the website you are reading now, is new in the English news media landscape in Costa Rica. Though the founder and people working with the website day to day have been involved with media and internet marketing for many years globally, the platform itself was only founded in December of 2011.

I am often asked: why does The Costa Rica Star exist and how do you think that the website is different?

I always answer that the website is different in the fact that the news is 100% unique, hand written, giving attribution on sources, and the overall tone of the content is such that it appeals to a Worldwide audience surrounding the topic of Costa Rica. Somewhat like an English version of La Nacion or a mini version of the BBC. We like to cater to English speaking Ticos as well as a truly global audience, writing about Africa, Asia, and Europe is important to us and many people in Costa Rica. World news is something that makes us clearly different in English news media here, and relating that news to Costa Rica is what we try to do while getting the content message across.

There is an awful lot of mis-information in the marketplace regarding the English news media landscape, so I wanted to take some time to outline my thoughts on this matter. Keep in mind that this article is published in the Blog section of The Costa Rica Star so it does have some opinion and is not strictly news style writing like the other topic categories.

InsideCostaRica.com

This website is not actually a news website in the strict sense of the term as most of the news is taken from elsewhere and then published with no or minimal attribution. I would consider this website an aggregation website solely. Many of the articles are put through Google Translate and then posted as is on the page of the article. InsideCostaRica.com has been around for quite some time now, so they have the legacy market penetration similar to some of the others below. The website is run by one person, by the name of Enrico Cacciatore, and he is originally from Eastern Canada, much like myself. We do not see what InsideCostaRica.com is doing as a bad thing, simply pointing out their strategy. Huffingtonpost.com does a lot of aggregation but they also publish unique articles.

AmCostaRica.com

I would consider AmCostaRica.com to be more of an editorial style website not a straight up news media website. Little or no attribution is given, there is no Google sitemap, and they are not in Google News. It reads more like an online magazine, with many banner ads that have been there for years with similar content topics. I always find it fascinating that AmCostaRica.com promotes the Del Rey Hotel in San Jose when I know for a fact that prostitution is one of the main attractions of that Hotel. Not that there is anything wrong with a woman’s choice to do as she pleases with her life, but I personally feel that advertising stuff like that takes away credibility from the website and a huge portion of the readership potential. Being that Costa Rica is very Roman Catholic, it would undoubtedly turn English speaking Tico readers off. Publishing content only on Monday to Friday, which they have traditionally done, also makes it so they are not a strictly speaking, news website. As news does happen on the weekend, obviously.

TheCostaRicaNews.com

This is one of the most interesting websites in the sense of search engine rankings alone. They are at the top of Google.com for ‘Costa Rica News’ searches, however they are like InsideCostaRica.com in that they are mainly an aggregate website with little or no attribution. Very little content is hand written and unique. They get their website rankings from link farms throughout the blogosphere, which may hurt them long term as the search engine algorithms become “wiser”. TheCostaRicaNews.com does cover some interesting topics from time to time, but it reads somewhat soul less as it feels very copy and pasted when you see the article content flow. The keyword ‘Costa Rica News’ gets around 15,000 global monthly searches, so you can expect that they receive a portion of that traffic along with Tico Times which I will talk about below.

TicoTimes.net

Arguably the most popular and well known English news media website in Costa Rica, Tico Times has been around for quite some time. They are not the oldest English news publication in the country, that honor goes to The News which was founded in 1897. Mainly focusing on a United States based audience here in Costa Rica. There content is updated semi regularly, with a portion of it being promotional materials not clearly separated from their news articles. The one massive down side that I feel will bring Tico Times to their knees over time, is that they have a pay wall forcing you to pay to read certain articles. I get that from a business standpoint, but what if another English news website is covering that same content and doing it for free, the likelihood of people paying will diminish over time. They will have to reinvent themselves and possibly end their print publication to increase their likelihood of longevity. I read the Tico Times regularly, mostly scanning the homepage on weekends for article topics that may interest me.

Closing Comments

There are a few other websites out there that offer Costa Rica news in English, but the regularity of the content is not daily so I did not mention them here within the article. A lot of the best Costa Rica News can be found by following conversations on Twitter using the #CostaRica hashtag or simply searching for Costa Rica in the search discover section when you are logged in. This is the raw unfiltered content that we live for and use to create compelling news that you cannot find anywhere else. You will find that the homepage of The Costa Rica Star to be vastly different then the others mentioned above, and we like it that way.

If you have any thoughts on English news media in Costa Rica related to this article please leave them below with your Facebook profile or send us an email using the contact form, we would love to hear from you.