KVEA GAINS IN SPANISH-SPEAKING MARKET : A STRONG CHOICE FOR LATINO VIEWERS

KVEA Channel 52 is bent on exploding the notion that Southern California is only large enough for one Spanish-language TV station.

In less than 15 months, the Reliance Capitol Group has transformed the former pay-TV station into a 16-hour-a-day broadcast outlet that has more than tripled its market share of a viewing audience still dominated by 24-year-old KMEX Channel 34.

Arbitron average weekly ratings show, for example, that the Glendale station has jumped from a 2% share of the Los Angeles market’s Spanish-speaking audience when it went on the air to a 34% share last month.

But more exciting for Spanish-language TV in general, officials from both stations say, are signs that KVEA’s growth has not come entirely at its competitor’s expense, but by creating for itself a new viewing audience.

“The old ground rules with which Spanish-language TV was played are gone,” said Frank Cruz, the former news anchor at KNBC Channel 4 who is KVEA’s vice president. “It is now more competitive, more professionally run, and run by people with a lot more broadcasting background.”

Felix Gutierrez, a USC journalism professor who writes about Spanish-language media in the United States, tends to agree.

“The clear winners are the Hispanic public because they now have choices,” said Gutierrez. “Before, if (viewers) didn’t like what they saw, they didn’t watch TV. Now they can watch another channel. The (ultimate) effect has to be an increase in the viewers for everybody.”

Despite the different language, there’s nothing exotic about KVEA’s tactics. “Counterprogramming,” Cruz said. “It’s something English-language stations have been practicing for years.”

When KMEX broadcasts telenovelas, the Spanish-language equivalent of English-language soap operas, KVEA airs movies. When its rival shows movies, KVEA runs telenovelas.

“It would be ridiculous to have the same kind of programming at the same time,” said Cruz, pointing during a recent interview to a youth-oriented show on KMEX that illuminated one of two screens in his office. “You try to go for the audience that isn’t tuning in to their program.”

Movies--many of them Spanish-dubbed spaghetti westerns and vintage Mexican musicals-- comprise about 40% of KVEA’s daily programming mix. Another 25% of its schedule is filled by telenovelas, compared to the higher proportion of soaps--about 40%--carried by KMEX. Local and national news make up another 12 1/2% of KVEA’s programming.

The fledgling station also has tried to distinguish itself from the “other” Spanish-language station with an aggressive approach to public affairs, sports and news programming.

Among the firsts it takes pride in are a bilingual broadcast of last fall’s East L.A. football classic, the Garfield-Roosevelt high school game, its preseason broadcasts of Los Angeles Raiders games and its airing of Archbishop Roger Mahony’s address to the Latino community at Dodger Stadium last summer.

The station will also be producing a Dodgers highlight show on Saturday afternoons during the baseball season. The half-hour program, hosted by Jaime Jarrin, the Dodgers’ Spanish sportscasting voice and KVEA’s sports director, will profile Latino players and recap the week’s best plays.

Another key ingredient of KVEA’s programming menu was unveiled last month: “Noticiero Telemundo,” a national, half-hour newscast at 6:30 p.m. that is provided by the Telemundo Group, the nation’s second Spanish-language network.

Telemundo, also a subsidiary of the Reliance Capital Group, promises in the coming months to provide another six hours a week of programming to KVEA and its sister stations in New York, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Cruz bristles when KVEA is compared to its cross-town rival, KMEX, arguing that the station deserves the same undivided media attention that English-language broadcasters routinely receive.

Yet he doesn’t hesitate to make comparisons himself. Maintaining that KVEA has changed the way Spanish-language news is presented in Los Angeles, he said, “People have forgotten just how bad the quality was” at KMEX before KVEA began producing its own newscasts.

KMEX’s local news and the national newscast provided by its parent company, Univision, have indeed undergone a renewal since KVEA went on the air. “Noticiero Univision,” a national nightly newscast, premiered last month. Produced at KMEX studios, the 50-minute program starting at 10:30 p.m. replaced the stolid “24 Hours,” a nightly news show produced in Mexico City by Univision’s parent company, Televisa.

Luis Nogales, director of Univision’s national newscasts and former chairman of United Press International, said that “Noticiero Univision” is “not a reactive” move to Reliance, but part of the Mexican-owned network’s long-planned expansion into the U.S. market.

Whether KVEA prompted the changes at KMEX, one thing is certain: The news diet of Los Angeles’ Spanish-language viewers has more than doubled since Reliance made its first move into Spanish-language TV two Novembers ago when it took control of a 64% share of the station. The balance is owned by John Blair & Co., a subsidiary of Reliance.

Today KVEA airs about 14 hours of news each week, including the 2 1/2 hours of “Noticiero Telemundo” out of Miami. KMEX broadcasts about 15 hours of Univision and locally produced news each week.

Spanish-language news viewership “is exploding,” concludes Mari-aala Massakas, research director at KMEX. “We have kept our viewers and (KVEA has) added theirs. Their success is our common success because they show (each station’s) commitment to news.”

Massakas said that KMEX has maintained its ratings for its locally produced and network news shows while KVEA has built its own news following. “Together,” she added, their viewership “outranks CBS’ news ratings (locally) and are now edging up on NBC.”

Across the broadcast day, however, KVEA’s growth appears to have caused a drop in KMEX’s ratings, although KMEX has been recovering.

KMEX’s viewership on a weekly, sign-on to sign-off basis dropped by 6% to 667,000 households last February from 706,000 households a year earlier, Arbitron ratings show. Since then, KMEX has been edging upward: In January, an average of 673,000 households tuned in to KMEX each week, only a 1% decrease from the 683,000 households it averaged during the same time last year.

Meanwhile, KVEA’s sign-on to sign-off viewership grew to 471,000 households last month, a 40% increase over January of last year.

Daniel Villanueva, KMEX’s president, concludes from these figures that KMEX’s viewership losses do not account for KVEA’s growth. Instead, Villanueva said that KVEA’s success proves something else: “Once again it shows that this is such a vitally growing market that it has absorbed another media outlet without missing a beat.”

“I think (he’s) right,” said Bob Kurtz, KVEA’s research director. “Some of their (KMEX’s) audience has eroded. But if you look at the numbers they were delivering then and now, it looks like there are more people” watching Spanish-language TV.

Despites its successes, KVEA still must overcome several challenges, the most serious of which is advertising-America’s reluctance to invest heavily in Spanish-language media.

So far, the industry’s overall reluctance has meant that KVEA continues to run in the red, a normal situation for a new station, Cruz maintained. “Most stations don’t begin to make money until the third or fourth year,” he said.

Although Cruz would not specify what KVEA’s revenues were, Hispanic Business, a Santa Barbara-based magazine that charts Spanish-language media performance, estimated that KVEA had revenues of $9 1/2 million last year compared to $36 million for KMEX.

Given the explosive growth of the Latino population and its purchasing power, however, Cruz insists that KVEA’s future cannot be anything but bright: “We’ve come a hell of a long way. (And) we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.”