A ‘Voz’ for Latino Listeners : All-Talk Spanish-Language Station Begins Broadcasting Monday

The last vacant spot on the local AM radio dial will be filled Monday with Southern California’s first all-talk Spanish-language station.

The inauguration of Orange-based KPLS (830 AM), which bills itself as La Voz ( the voice ) is the culmination of an 11-year effort by the Villanueva family of Los Angeles. Danny Villanueva Sr. built popular TV station KMEX-TV Channel 34 before selling it in 1986.

All-talk Spanish-language radio has been catching on in New York, and especially Miami, where three of the eight top-rated Spanish-language stations are talk format (including the No. 1 station). The talk format is also gaining in popularity in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, according to Danny Villanueva Jr., part owner of KPLS.

“This (Southern California) market has really grown to the point where it merits this kind of format,” Villanueva said in an interview at the station Thursday. “We believe the niche for this is much greater than anyone anticipated.”

The Los Angeles/Orange County Spanish-language radio market “is fairly well flooded with music stations,” said Felix Gutierrez, vice president of the Freedom Forum, a media research foundation based in Arlington, Va. “It always bewildered me” that no one had tried the talk format here, he said.

Southern California’s Latino community “is a population that is very interested in news, both domestically and internationally,” said Gutierrez, a former USC instructor who has written extensively on Spanish-language radio in the Southwest.

The owners of Orange County Broadcasting Co., parent company of KPLS, applied for the license in 1980 and six years later were awarded the frequency, the only one in the Los Angeles-Orange County market not already assigned by the FCC. It has built an organization from scratch that includes a new, state-of-the-art studio in Orange and a duplicate studio under construction in Los Angeles.

With four news vans, along with seven mobile reporters based in two bureaus (in Los Angeles and Orange) and news stringers in Ventura County and the Inland Empire, the station has made a commitment to cover breaking news as well as features in the large and growing Latino population served by the station (estimated at about 3.9 million people).

KPLS will broadcast at 2,500 watts from a transmitter in the hills east of Orange and will simulcast on KCTQ (850 AM), a 750-watt station in Thousand Oaks. The signal will extend from Carlsbad in northern San Diego County north to Ventura, and inland as far as San Bernardino and Ontario.

“We’re talking about news and information that affects the lives of Hispanics,” said station general manager Leopoldo Ramos, one of several KMEX veterans now at KPLS. In addition to covering stories specific to the Latino community, the station will offer a Latino perspective on wider issues; for instance, “Latino involvement in Desert Storm, and how the war affected the average Latino,” Ramos said.

The KPLS day will start with a four-hour morning drive program hosted by two veterans of TV and radio in the United States and Mexico, Manuel Lopez Ochoa and Pilar Camporredondo. The program will mix entertainment and informational features “in a light way,” interspersed with news and traffic reports, Camporredondo said.

Throughout the day there will be news, sports and current events programs, along with call-in talk shows on a variety of topics. America Bracho, a physician and public health professional, formerly director of the AIDS project for the Latino community in Detroit, will host a daily two-hour talk program covering health, education and parenting.

Bracho said the program will cover such topics as high-school dropout rates among Latino students, migration and culture shock, local health issues and some international issues, such as the continuing cholera epidemic in Peru.

She will “talk about things that no one is talking about,” Bracho said, bringing in experts on topics in addition to fielding calls. “For me, this was an opportunity to reach more people,” she said, explaining the decision to leave her post in Detroit for the KPLS show.

On weekends, the station will offer live broadcasts of soccer games from Mexico. The station has also cut a deal with La Red, a Mexican radio news service, for news reports from Mexico, and will also air vintage novelas.

“It’s an interesting addition to the Los Angeles market,” said Amy Masson, media director for Newport Beach-based Ad Rendon, a Latino advertising and public relations agency. “The Hispanic market is becoming very developed. It’ll be very interesting to see how they take off in the market.”

Villanueva said that Spanish-language music stations are profitable and cheaper to operate than an all-talk station, which may have led to reluctance to experiment with the format. Villanueva declined to offer an estimate of the cost of launching the station but said owners are putting “nearly seven figures” into an extensive promotional campaign.

Camporredondo was the host of the top-rated talk show in San Antonio, Texas’ Spanish-language market. The mainstream English-language media have “put (Latinos) aside, in a way,” creating a void that Spanish-language talk formats are filling in other markets. “People are really in need of it,” she said.