Telemundo
Telemundo is an
American television network based in
Hialeah, Florida. It is the second largest
Spanish language television network in the United States, second only to
Univision.
NBC Universal is the present parent company of the network.
Telemundo began in
1984 as
Net Span, bringing together several Spanish-language independent stations not affiliated with the Spanish International Network (now
Univision ), though the ownership of these television stations began in the early 1980's. The group included
WNJU in
New York City,
KVEA in
Los Angeles,
WCIU in
Chicago,
KSTS in
San Jose/
San Francisco and
WSCV in
Ft. Lauderdale/
Miami.
In
1986, Net Span was purchased by
Saul Steinberg and
Henry Silverman. The duo later purchased the oldest television station in
Puerto Rico,
WKAQ-TV, known on-air as "Telemundo Canal 2." Steinberg and Silverman changed Net Span's name to
Telemundo in order to trade on the well-known Telemundo name. Soon afterward,
Noticiero Telemundo/HBC with
Jorge Gestoso and Lana Montalban began broadcasting out of a warehouse in
Hialeah, Florida.
The staff was made mostly of former SIN employees who defected the network when it was announced that Mexican television news anchor
Jacobo Zabludosky would be heading north to anchor the newscast. This never happened, as Zabludosky stayed back in Mexico, but the cornerstone of what would become the second Hispanic broadcast network in the United States was laid. A year later
Deportes Telemundo, a two-hour sports show, began airing nationally.
Between
1988 and
1991, the network acquired stations in
Texas,
New Mexico,
Arizona and
Washington state.
The network then decided to outsource their news division in
1988 and hired
CNN to produce 2 newscasts under the name of
"Noticiero Telemundo CNN". It was anchored by Gestoso, who recently been transferred to
Atlanta, and Miami native Maria Elvira Salazar.
Salazar left after her contract expired and returned to Miami to report for
Noticiero Univision. In her place, CNN hired Miss Universe 1987
Cecilia Bolocco. Bolocco had no journalism experience, having studied architecture in her native land. A year later, Bolocco was transferred to Miami to anchor a lifestyles program more atune with her skills, called
La Buena Vida.
In
1992, Telemundo went through another management change, this time under former Univision president Joaquin Blaya. Blaya brought in a large number of former Univision executives in hopes of, as one observer put it, "beating his former employer to death with a
Piñata stick." Television shows were cancelled or merged. Longtime Telemundo executives were released and in
1993, Telemundo branded themselves with the campaign,
Arriba, Telemundo, Arriba.
Bolocco saw her show merged with newsmagazine
Ocurrió Así anchored by
Enrique Gratas.
Contacto, an afternoon women's magazine, was revamped as
Club Telemundo. Two of its original anchors were fired. It kept Mexican soap star Rebecca Rambal as main hostess alongside new arrival Pedro Luis Garcia, a radio disc jockey from New York.
Gratas, Bolocco, Rambal and Guerra are no longer with the network; Gratas is now anchoring
Noticiero Univision, Ultima Hora and Bolocco went back to her native Chile after starring in a soap opera
Morelia and married former Argentine President
Carlos Saul Menem. She gave birth to the couple's son in
2003. Rambal lives in Los Angeles and Garcia went back to New York to work for WNJU.
In 1993, Telemundo began a trend that has been proven to be semi sucessful: Producing their own soap operas. The first soap to be produced and bought by the network was "Angelica, mi vida" in 1988. The trend continued with "Marielena", a soap opera written by drama doyenne Delia Fiallo exclusively for the network. "Marielena" was the story of a young woman who falls in love with a married man. The stars of the soap were Mexican Lucia Mendez, Eduardo Yanez and Cuban Zuli Montero who portrayed the older woman married to Yanez's character. The soap was so popular that was stretched by 50 extra episodes bringing new characters and disposing of others. The trend continued with "Guadalupe" and "Tres Destinos". In no time, Telemundo saw their productions being courted by international markets and syndicators. This ruffled feathers among the industry's leader, Televisa, who saw how to remedy the situation by buying the production house responsible for making the Telemundo soaps: Capitalvision. They bought them for an astronomical amount only to shut them down two months later and put them out of business.
By this time however, the "suits" decided to utilize the Telemundo Puerto Rico facilities to produce their soaps, after producer CAPITALVISION was bought by rival Televisa of Mexico. Thinking they could replicate the same success in San Juan, Telemundo set to produce "Senora Tentacion", again with Lucia Mendez. "Senora" turned out to be a disaster waiting to happen. Mendez's ego could not fit inside a jumbo jet and the production was plagued by delays with the production staff, changed scripts, backstage drama forcing Telemundo to cut the production in almost half. Mendez has not worked for Telemundo nor Televisa again, but for
TV AZTECA starring in soaps that have never been able to match the success of "Marielena"
Blaya and his employees incurred astronomical expenses without the much anticipated revenue, and then were terminated. Telemundo found itself trying to reinvent itself under the leadership of Roland Hernandez in 1995.
In
1998, Telemundo was bought by a partnership between cable's Liberty Media and entertainment conglomerate
Sony Pictures Entertainment Helmed by yet another management team under the leadership of former
CBS executive Peter Tortoricci, hopes of attracting the bilingual market were explored.
Lo mejor de los dos Mundos ("The best of both worlds") campaign was launched. Several billboards went up in cities such as
Miami and
San Francisco heralding a "new era" for Telemundo.
This new executive teamdecided to get away from the warehouse atmosphere of the production facilities base in working class Hialeah. The network set up new corporate offices at the posh Waterford Complex in
Santa Monica, California. At the time it was decided to produce Latino versions of popular American television shows owned by
Sony. These included
Charlie's Angels,
One Day at a Time, and
Starsky and Hutch.
The network also tried its luck by having a priest anchor a talk show. "Padre Alberto", Father Alberto Cutie, a Miami priest was tapped in to host this program. Sadly, this venture also failed. If Telemundo had any traces of ratings, this experiment was the last nail on its coffin. Telemundo became the laughing stock of the industry. Galan's ideas and shows all flopped--in fact, viewers left the network in droves. Local stations lost the little audience share they had, and heads began to roll once again. The Tortoricci team was soon out, and Jim MacNamara, a former
Universal Pictures executive born in
Panama, was hired to preside over embattled Telemundo.
MacNamara began programming a schedule heavy on
telenovelas. Under his leadership, Telemundo bought alternative programming from distributors from
Brazil ,
Colombia and
Mexico.
His strategy worked, and U.S. Hispanics saw a new Telemundo emerging with hits such as "Xica de Silva", a Brazilian soap, and the most popular export from Colombia: "Soy Betty, la Fea". "Pedro el Escamoso" "El Clon", "Terra Nostra", followed, and it seemed for a time that the network was finally able to compete. Local stations in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York added morning and weekend newscasts to be more competitive.
In
2001, Telemundo was purchased by
NBC and is now a part of
NBC Universal. Jim MacNamara helmed the network during and after the sale. Their main competitor,
Univision, continues to have an upper hand in the ratings wars. However, Telemundo has more original produced programming than Univision and does not rely strictly on Mexican shows. In contrast, Univision's schedule is heavy on Mexican showes since it is part-owned by Mexican media giant
Televisa. After 3 great years, NBC officials asked MacNamara to resign, and now the network is once again with a new president heading the operations: Don Browne who used to helm local NBC affiliate WTVJ in Miami. On February 27th, 2006, it was announced to NBC hired Nely Galan yet again to helm a division for the network based on the success of Hispanic soaps for NBC. Only time will tell if Galan will succeed or if she will again, fail.
In
2004, Telemundo began subtitling their telenovelas into English in the hopes of getting
Hispanic Americans that did not speak Spanish to tune in. Subtitles are broadcast by using
closed captioning. All of Telemundo's telenovelas are also closed captioned in Spanish. However, in order to activate the captions in English, viewers have to tune the caption to CC3, a closed-caption channel widely available on most newer-model televisions less than five years old, though typically not available on older-model televisions.
Logos
Image:WKAQ 1992.jpg|Telemundo logo from the late-1980s to 1993 (this example is from an ad for WKAQ).Image:Telemundos.png|The logo used between 1993 and 1999.Image:logo_telemundo.gif|The logo used between 1999 and 2000.Image:Telemundo_tv_logo.png|The present logo used from 2000. In 1997, after years of showing children's programming, Telemundo started producing its own morning show in hopes of beating Univision's long running hit
Despierta América. It began with a Spanish language version of
CBS News This Morning called
Esta Mañana. It was anchored by former CBS News morning anchor
Jose Diaz-Balart (brother of U.S. Congress Representatives for the state of Florida,
Lincoln Diaz-Balart and
Mario Diaz-Balart), Rogelio Mora-Tagle did the news segments, and Mexican hostess Gloria Calzada was brought up from Mexico City. This venture lasted two years before yielding to yet another morning show:
De Mañanita.
"De Mañanita" was mainly known for having more anchors than any show in the United States: It was anchored by Pita Ojeda, Luisa Fernanda, Ricky Luis, Max Aub and Fernando del Rincón and Marian De la Fuente. De la Fuente, a Spaniard and the only non-Mexican in the anchor group, came to Telemundo to anchor an ill fated 24 hour news service, then very popular in the Spanish television world of the early 90's. Another service broadcasted in Latin America competing with Telenoticias was "Canal de Noticias NBC" with former Telemundo Los Angeles anchor Ana Luisa Herrera and former Telemundo Miami anchor Nicolas Kasanzew helming the effort from Charlotte, NC. "CNN en Español", was anchored by Jorge Gestoso, who used to be the Telemundo HBC news anchor from Atlanta.
The service was called Telenoticias. Marian became one of the most popular faces in the broadcast. Her Spanish accent long thought to be a deterrent, in fact became a winning strategy to De la Fuente and during her time at Telemundo. That, and her big luxurious hairstyles and sexy outfits, became topics of conversation among gossip magazines published in the United States. De la Fuente in turn became the face of morning news at Telemundo and covered important events such as the first anniversary of the Terrorist Attacks to the World Trade Center in New York in 2002. She wrote a book about her experiences as a journalist covering the attacks.
This breakfastcast lasted until summer 2004 when after many host changes, including the exits of Del Rincón who went on to be a co-presenter of Univision's tabloid show, "Primer Impacto", and Luisa Fernanda then shipped to the gossip show "Cotorreando". Behind the scenes, things were more dramatic: a barrage of drama which included the firing and quitting of executive producers. By then, the last original anchor Pita Ojeda also left Telemundo in a dispute with management over wanting to do some outside projects like other network personalities were allowed to do so. It was also noted that she was unhappy with the direction of the program which went from three hours to one hour to accommodate a new morning show, called "Hoy en el Mundo". This program was yet anchored by
Marian de la Fuente and the now resurfed José Díaz Balart. At the end, both shows "Hoy", and "De Mañanita" were both cancelled. Telemundo launched this show after September 11 heralding to anyone who listened the "true alternative" in morning wars. These shows were dead on arrival and nothing Telemundo producers conceived was able to knockoff Univision's breakfast show "Despierta América" ("Wake up, America").
In
2005, Telemundo got a new president, Don Browne whom replaced MacNamara. He hired away
María Antonieta Collins from
Univision (who had in turn worked for
Televisa for many years), a weekend
Univision news anchor to helm a new three hour news/features morning show to replace both "Hoy en el Mundo" and "De Mañanita" and relaunch it with the name of "Cada Día con Maria Antonieta".
"Hoy en el Mundo" lead anchor
Marian De La Fuente who was asked to join the new morning show as a news reader, but decided to as well leave the network, leaving the news portions to be done by José Díaz Balart.
As mentioned before, another failed experiment took place at Telemundo in early 1994. Tired of having
CNN dictating how to cover their newscast, Telemundo decided to launch "Telenoticias". "Telenoticias" was a 24-hour news feed service aimed to viewers in Latin America. The service was to be owned by
Reuters,
Antena 3 of Spain, and
Artear Network from
Argentina. A newscast was produced for the U.S audience as well, anchored by Raul Peimbert and Denisse Oller.
Within 2 years, Oller was gone and ironically replaced by Maria Elvira Salazar. Years later the network went through another phase when
CBS Network decided to get involved in the Latin news game and bought the network rebranding it "CBS Telenoticias". This also failed;
CBS decided to sell this venture to a group from Mexico named Medcom. Medcom owned various radio ventures but did not know how anything about 24-hour news. .
Things got so bad that once payroll was not met and executives had to beg employees to finish the workweek. Finally, Telemundo which was leaving bankruptcy court decided to invest a reportedly 5 million dollars and bought the service from Medcom, rebranding the 24-hour news service, Telemundo Internacional.
By the time this happened both Peimbert and Salazar were gone replaced by Guillermo Dezcalzi and Ana Patricia Candiani. Dezcalzi who was afflicted by a well know drug problem while working at "Canal de Noticias NBC", left Telemundo soon after that and Pedro Sevecq who used to have a talk show on the Telemundo Network side saw his dream come true when he was asked to co-anchor the program. The newsprogram went through another metamorphosis when it was reported that Candiani would be fired from the newscast to leave Uruguayan Pedro Sevecq as sole anchor for the network. Candiani would end up as a correspondent for "Cada Dìa", but rejoin Sevec for Telemundo's Sunday newsmagazine
Sin Fronteras). In June of 2006 "Sin Fronteras" was cancelled leaving dozens without a job.
It should be noted that the name "Telenoticias" originated with the newscast of WKAQ-TV, Telemundo Puerto Rico, where it is used since 1954 to the present.
The network was the first Spanish language broadcaster to broadcast NBA Games with
La NBA/WNBA en Telemundo until 2005 when those rights went to ABC/Disney owned
ESPN Deportes.
The network produces more than 50 percent of its content in the United States. Much of the rest of the shows are imported from
Mexico and other Latin American countries such as
Brazil and
Colombia. Mexican TV broadcaster
TV Azteca has been the main provider of Mexican telenovelas produced by
Producciones Argos. Now separated from TV Azteca (because Azteca launched a U.S. network,
Azteca America), Argos has produced telenovelas directly for Telemundo, such as the hit
Gitanas.
Telemundo also brought the Olympics to Hispanic viewers as well. Overhyped by the new management, as the salvation of the network Telemundo saw modest results after the
Athens Olympics. Because of this failure, Telemundo broadcasted minimum coverage of the
2006 Winter Olympics in
Turin, Italy as part of its
Deportes Telemundo reports.
Deportes Telemundo continues to broadcast monthly boxing matches, as well as futbol (soccer) including the Mexico vs. USA battles, and the weekend sportscast
Titulares Telemundo at 11pm (or after local news on certain Telemundo stations).
On
January 9, 2006, Telemundo launched a new afternoon block with the arrival of Mexican soap star Laura León known as "La Tesorito", and her talk show
Señora León. The show is taped in Peru and broadcasted to the U.S. Also added to the schedule on this date was a pseudo-dating game show from Los Angeles called ''12 Corázonès, complete with an astrologer and a former singer. The afternoon talk show hosted by Laura Leon has reportedly ceased production due to low ratings, and is scheduled to be replaced by an afternoon novela and a one hour afternoon game show.
On
April 5, 2006, Mexican production company Grupo Xtra and Telemundo announced the creation of two new companies: the production company Estudios Mexicanos Telemundo, which will produce content in Mexico for exhibition in Mexico, Spanish-speaking markets in the United States and Latin America, and Palmas 26, which was created to identify strategic growth opportunities in the Mexican television industry.
On
June 13, 2006, Telemundo entered a new lond-term production deal with game show and reality TV producer
Nostromo America. The producer will develop alongside with the network's upcoming game shows such as "El Gran Show", which is a Saturday variety show which will compete directly with
Univision longtime Saturday variety show
Sabado Gigante. And "Vas o no Vas", the Spanish-language version of sister network
NBC's
Deal or no Deal, which was originally shown and produced by Televisa's
XEW-TV. It was also announced that Telemundo would no longer air the controversial talk show "
Laura" which moves to Mexican TV Network Televisa in the fall of 2006.
*
List of Telemundo affiliates*
List of United States television networks*
Official Site*
Telemundo, from the
Museum of Broadcast Communications website
*
Pita Ojeda group @ Yahoo*
NBC Universal's media village website
