As we come up on nearly 3 years since my wife Tamanna and I purchased MND, we find ourselves taking stock of the business. We believe that our mission statement is more relevant than ever: “To elevate the profile of Mexico as a premier destination for tourists, expats, investors and businesses by providing the most complete and balanced news and information on Mexico.”
We are doing very well on all of our reader metrics: more views, more newsletter subscribers, more paid subscribers (thank you!), and more reader comments. If you are not actively monitoring our comments section, I encourage you to do so as we are increasingly getting high quality discussion and debates going amongst our readers.
As a further check on how we are doing, we recently did some testing on four of the most popular artificial intelligence (AI) services: ChatGPT, Grok, Perplexity and Google Gemini. We asked each one the simple question of “What is the best source of English language news in Mexico?” In all four cases, the answer was crystal clear: Mexico News Daily. It has taken countless hours of hard work to get that kind of recognition and it makes our entire team swell with pride.
Our team has demonstrated that we are restless and tireless in our quest to get better each and every day. We frequently say that we are just getting started — and we mean it. In just the past year, we have eliminated ads entirely from our site. We have launched and continue to improve MND Local (a lot more coming soon on this front!). We have added MND Tutor to help you with your Spanish and MND Quiz to help you test your news retention of the week. We have created an MND TV Youtube channel — with some surprises coming soon. We continue to add articles that offer perspectives that challenge your thinking. We will increasingly engage with our readers in new and exciting ways.
But as we looked at our progress thus far, we realized that one thing was missing: a bridge to the future. We didn’t have anything focused on the next generation — on children. Our mission to elevate Mexico feels incomplete if we are not also helping inspire and educate the young people who will shape Mexico’s future and its relationship with the world. So after months of speaking with educators, administrators and kids in both Mexico and the United States, we are proud to present to you: MND Kids. Our motivation behind MND Kids is five fold:
- Educators and parents have told us how it is increasingly difficult to get kids to read long-form content like books.
- Educators told us that there is a dearth of nonfiction content available that is unbiased, apolitical and kid-friendly. They stressed to us how crucial high-quality nonfiction is for literacy programs, as it helps kids build critical thinking skills and connect what they read to the world around them.
- We heard that kids are increasingly tuning out of reading the news and relying exclusively on social media to learn about what is going on in the world. They are losing the critical thinking skill of reading news: differentiating fact from opinion and sorting out what is real news versus fake, AI-generated content.
- Our team is passionate about the importance of Mexican-American kids in the U.S. having access to relevant, timely, kid-friendly news and information about Mexico. We found ourselves asking: How unfortunate would it be if many of these kids didn’t learn about the good of Mexico until they are much older?
- We believe that kids of any background living in the U.S. or Mexico need to have access to high-quality news and information about Mexico. Mexico and the U.S. are inseparable siblings and a shared understanding of each other is more important than ever.
We are just getting started with this new offering. You can see an initial preview of it at mndkids.com. A few things to notice:
1. All articles were originally published in Mexico News Daily.
2. We are selecting 4-5 articles per week and rewriting them for different ages of kids.
3. Each article is customizable — meaning that upon opening each article, you can click on the language that you want to read it in (Spanish or English) and then choose the right reading level. The article then automatically shows the appropriate level of content in the selected language.
4. There are discussion questions for each article (appropriate to the selected level), and we will soon be adding additional components like comprehension questions, key word definitions, etc.
5. The site still has no password protection — so you can go right to the site and check everything out.
We are just getting started on this initiative. We have piloted this product with a bilingual high school in the Chicago area and are in the process of signing up more schools throughout the United States and Mexico. The feedback we have heard from kids, parents, teachers and administrators has been extremely positive and as a result we are accelerating the rollout of this offering.
This initiative is deeply personal for us, and we believe that it resonates with the MND community’s shared values. In the U.S., Latinos represent the largest and fastest-growing segment of the youth population. By providing accessible, engaging news about Mexico, we have a huge opportunity to foster literacy, encourage critical thinking, strengthen cultural ties and empower the next generation of leaders. It is in our collective interest to ensure that young minds have the skills they need to succeed and stay connected to and proud of their heritage.
That being said, we need your help to get MND Kids in front of more people. If you think the schools of your children, grandchildren or friends would benefit from an MND Kids subscription, please let us know by emailing us here: [email protected].
We will also be offering MND Kids as part of a new “MND Family Subscription” coming soon. Stay tuned …
Thank you for being a subscriber of MND!
Travis Bembenek is the CEO of Mexico News Daily and has been living, working or playing in Mexico for nearly 30 years.
