Finding Latino/-a voices online will get a little easier thanks to a $10,000 grant to one of our local heroes, Teresa Puente: Columbia College Chicago journalism professor, Chicago Sun-Times editorial board member, and now leader of a blog platform, Latina Voices that will deliver serious news by, for, and about Latina women (geez, when are you gonna sleep, Teresa?). Of course she’s a Studs Terkel Community Media awardee… from back when she worked at the Tribune, in 2000!

Here’s the flavor of what she’s planning based on the following, very cool, description from the grant award site:

My website will highlight the voices of Latina women and primarily focus on commentary and culture. One of the first things I will do is establish a network of comadres, a term in Spanish used to describe a godmother, or a friend as close as a sister. The comadres will be professional Latina journalists who are interested in mentoring Latina journalism students. I will ask my comadres to occasionally contribute to the website but mostly I will ask them to mentor a college student who is studying journalism. The goal is for these students to do professional-quality work and publish on the website. Then I will ask each of the college students to mentor a high school student, and they also will publish on the website. The idea is to build up the community of Latina writers with the experienced helping the youth. Our base is to start with students at Columbia College Chicago, where I am a full-time faculty member, but the goal is to build up a national network.

J-Lab made the grant as part of a New Media Women project, with funding from the McCormick Foundation (read more about the project at their blog. In addition to Teresa, the winners were Echo, a system of public storytelling installations in Atlanta and Northwest Navy News, a networking site for Puget Sound’s military community accordong to the newmediawomen.com Web site.

Latina Voices may not really be directly pitchable, sounds like. But there are some other sites by/for Latinos that are, I’ll try and pull some together in the next day or two.