He Sees an Exciting Role for Latino Radio

An engineer is still installing machinery in the control room. The carpeting still smells new. And the six microphones at a round table in the remote studio look untouched but ready to go.

The nation’s first 24-hour, Spanish-language, all-news radio station will not debut for a few more weeks. But for months now, a team of managers, entrepreneurs and technicians has been planning and strategizing and carefully mapping out KPLS, a new AM station that will reach thousands of listeners from Oxnard to Tijuana to Big Bear.

Based in Orange, the new station will feature a variety of news, talk shows, sports and other reports. And at the helm will be Leo Ramos, general manager for the new station owned by Orange County Broadcasting Corp.

Ramos, a veteran of several new ventures in the field of broadcasting, said this project is especially exciting.

“Radio is the preferred medium of Hispanics,” he said. “When we decided to do this, we didn’t just say, ‘Everybody else is doing music. Let’s do talk.’

“We did a lot of studies, and found that overwhelmingly, Hispanics want more and better radio, and that means more news.”

Ramos is changing gears from television--he was general manager of KMEX-TV Channel 34, one of the most-watched, Spanish-language stations--to radio in an effort that some would consider risky.

“Talk radio requires a lot of resources,” he said. “It’s very labor-oriented, very talent-oriented. You need producers, writers, on-air people--folks that stations that just spin records don’t need.”

There are more than a dozen Spanish-language radio stations already on the air.

But the station’s research showed that with the Latino population continuing to grow--it almost doubled in Orange County between 1980 and 1990--the popularity of the Spanish-language media would continue. And that finding, according to Ramos, makes advertisers sit up and take notice.

“Spanish-language radio is . . . here to stay,” he said. “It tells people, ‘You don’t have to give up your language to be well-informed.’ ”

Ramos has worked in Spanish-language broadcasting since 1984, a bit of an irony for someone who felt so unsure of his own fluency in Spanish that he went off to Mexico for intensive study a few years ago.

A native of El Paso, he grew up in Los Angeles and attended UCLA. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he worked as a deputy counsel in the Los Angeles city attorney’s office. Later, he was the dean of finance and administration for the Loyola University Law School.

While working on the executive staff of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984, he met Daniel Villanueva, a principal stockholder in SIN, a Mexican television conglomerate. Villanueva offered him a job as executive vice president and general manager of KINT-TV in El Paso, another new station.

“I’m in this business because it’s perfect for me,” Ramos said. “The idea of working in the Hispanic community and for Hispanics had a lot of social and ideological and emotional appeal to me.”