As an extension of The Write Publicist & Co.’s tourism contracts, the company has added a Sports Tourism Department. Maria Aleandra Scafati of New York City will make all media placements for the division.

Scafati received doctorates from Milano Graduate School with a Master of Sciences in Major Urban Policy. She attended graduate school at New York University for Journalism, and later Harvard University. Her under graduate degree in accounting is from Universidad de Belgranoin Argentina. Other studies include News Production at New York University. Scafati worked for Uni vision News USA as a Financial Analyst for the News Department, and for Merck Sharpe & Dome USA as at translator of press releases. Prior to that she was with Business Week/ Apertura as a Latin America Corre spondent. She also worked for the Harvard Business Review in Boston and as a freelance news reporter for Periódico Carta Abierta in Argentina.

“We were in the process of looking for someone with a New York connection who could handle all of our Latino news placements, especially as it relates to sports and tour is., When Maria called us, her timing was perfect. We recently landed a client in East Lansing, Mich. who has a product line that we wished to market to the Latino audience,” said Write Publicist’s Regina Lynch-Hudson also noting that most of the major Latino news outlets are in New York.

Speaking of the need for creating messaging specifically for Latin markets, Lynch-Hudson said, “Television specials and feature articles in newspapers across the country are further testament to Latino emergence into U.S. national culture and political discourse. The cultural emergence reflects widespread changes in U.S. ethnicity. By 2050, as the nation’s ‘minority’ groups together become its majority population, Latinos will be the largest of them all, comprising more than one-fourth of the U.S. total, a share already surpassed in New Mexico, California, and Texas.”