Spanish TV, Radio Gear Up for Duty on Front Lines : Media: Stations plan up-to-the-minute reports and continuous coverage to keep the local Latino community informed.

Local Spanish-language radio and television stations are gearing up for the possibility of war in the Middle East, with one radio station tapping a popular on-air personality for an assignment in Saudi Arabia and television stations positioning themselves as informational conduits to the Latino community.

Popular KWKW “La Mexicana” (1330-AM) has plans to send its midday personality Hernan Escandon to the gulf should fighting break out.

“Hernan will leave the minute they say go, which could be today or tomorrow or the next day,” said Jim Kalmensen, KWKW’s vice president of sales and marketing.

“It’s very unusual to send an on-the-air announcer,” Kalmensen continued. “But he’s been in the market for 25 years, and our listening audience represents families of people over there so we feel the greatest impact is sending somebody who has regular contact with the audience.”

The station’s most popular personality Jaime Jarrin, vice president of news and also the Spanish-language “Voice of the Dodgers,” will supervise news coverage.

“Beginning Monday, we started interrupting all regular programming--a song or an on-air game or contest--to provide up-to-the-minute reporting from the Middle East,” Kalmensen said. “We’re trying to position ourselves as the station where you don’t have to wait till the top of the hour to hear the news.”

Stations KTNQ (1020-AM) and KLVE (107.5-FM) hope to send two people to the gulf, the assistant news director and a free-lance correspondent, said their general manager, Ken Wolt.

Wolt has expanded his seven-member news staff to nine employees, added hourly updates and said the two stations will suspend regular programming “the minute something should happen.”

Television station KMEX Channel 34, part of the nine-station Univision network, on Monday began offering hourly two-minute news breaks on the gulf crisis. The station’s foreign and national coverage will originate from the Univision news department, while KMEX staffers will produce stories on how events in the Middle East shake down locally, said KMEX news director Fernando Lopez.

“We’re going to look at the home front, the repercussions, what the city will be doing if we go to war,” Lopez said.

“In addition to just informing, we will take on an intermediary role,” Lopez said. “There are many in the Latino community here with sons over there and a lot of those people still don’t speak English. It’s hard for them to call their local Army office and say, ‘I want to talk to my son.’ ”

Lopez said that the station will urge those people to call the news department for help.

If war is declared, KMEX will suspend much of its regular programming to offer coverage.

The station also has added to its regular news lineup a “Nightline”-style program--originating from Univision network headquarters in Miami--starting today. “En Vivo,” a half-hour news show providing commentary and analysis, will air nightly at 11. KVEA Channel 52 also will focus on local reaction from the Latino community while it airs reports from the Telemundo network and Cable News Network.

The station recently featured a live call-in interview with an Iraqi Embassy official in Mexico City, and local news broadcasts provide a segment for daily analysis. Also, a news segment is planned for origination at a military installation in Barstow, said anchor and senior producer Jesus Javier.

Javier has applied for permission to go to Saudi Arabia, should war break out. “I think an anchor presence out in the field is very important,” he said.

“We’re covering this internationally, nationally, regionally and locally as much as we possibly can,” Javier said. “We’re going to be looking at the economic, social and political ramifications and we’ll be talking to people about what this means to them.”