Latino Presence Boosts KTTV News

When television news reporter Christina Gonzalez jumped from the Spanish-language Univision network to English-language station KTTV-TV nine years ago, she brought more than an impressive resume and years of experience with her.

She also brought an accent.

“It was scary,” she remembers. “I felt I had this accent that nobody else could understand.”

What once was a liability, however, is becoming an asset in Southern California, where the Latino population of L.A. and Orange counties alone has doubled in the last nine years. So when many L.A. viewers listen to Gonzalez report a story, they hear themselves reflected in her voice.

It’s that kind of familiarity, mixed with an increase in coverage of Latino issues and an ethnically diverse reporting staff, that has helped turn KTTV into the dominant English-language news show for Latinos in Los Angeles.

The station already is the No. 1 10 p.m. news show among all households in this market. Since May 1996, KTTV has outpaced KTLA-TV, long L.A.’s dominant 10 p.m. newscast anchored by Hal Fishman.

Those gains have been helped by the Fox network programming that leads into the nightly newscast. The action-oriented shows and urban-themed sitcoms often outperform the other networks among younger, middle-income viewers--a demographic that covers most of Southern California’s Latino households. During the last four November sweeps periods, the station’s prime-time programming has drawn more Latino households than anybody but Spanish-language KMEX-TV, outpacing both KVEA-TV and KWHY-TV, the market’s other major Spanish-language broadcasters.

“Fox and UPN and other stations come in and they’re basically laying claim to other segments of the population [underserved by the major networks] and building programming around that,” says Chon A. Noriega, a professor in the Film and Television Department at UCLA. “And then as they develop news components to go along with that, it reflects the audience that they have in their entertainment programming.”

In KTTV’s case, incorporating Fox programming’s sensibility into its newscasts has given the station a gritty, hip, street-level flavor that has helped to pull viewers from prime time into news. But what Fox calls hip and gritty others have labeled sensationalistic and violent.

Jeff Cole, director of UCLA’s Center for Communication Policy, has called Fox’s popular real-life video shows “the equivalent of auto-accident programming on network television.”

But Joe Saltzman, a professor of journalism at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications, disagrees: “I don’t think KTTV is doing anything special, other than maybe adding a little more flash and panache.”

“The way in which they cover local news looks a lot more like the city,” adds UCLA’s Noriega. “Latinos are able to identify more with the local coverage. . . . [It’s] a little bit more representative of the city.”

As KTTV’s audience has grown, competitors have begun incorporating some of the same elements. Overall, local TV coverage of the Latino community has increased, and most now advertise their English-language newscasts on Spanish-language radio. In addition, KTLA, KCAL-TV and KCOP-TV, like KTTV, offer translations of their newscasts in Spanish. KTTV is the only station to offer Spanish simulcasts of its morning news shows, but the station’s selling point remains the content of its newscasts, which, for the last seven years, have been under the direction of 44-year-old Jose Rios, the station’s news director.

“They actually cover things that go on in the Latino community,” adds Esther Renteria, chair of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, “which some of the other stations don’t really do.”

Though none of KTTV’s main news anchors are Latino (John Beard and Christine Devine anchor the newscasts most weeknights with Jeff Michael and Susan Hirasuna anchoring on the weekends), sports anchor Rick Garcia and many of the station’s core reporters--among them Tony Valdez, Gonzalez, Bernard Gonzales and David Garcia--are. That means nearly a third of the people KTTV puts before the camera are Latino, believed to be the highest percentage of any English-language station in the market. That impacts the Latino audience, according to a recent national study by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, which found that, among Latino viewers, who is doing the speaking is almost as important as what they’re saying.

Rios also has extended the range of the stories the station covers down to and across the Mexican border. As a result, KTTV has reported on everything from Mexican adoptions to the growing number of Mexican professionals crossing the border seeking better-paying jobs.

At the same time, the station also has covered a wide range of local stories, including the growing influence of Latino politicians in California and the local convention of the Mexican American Grocers Assn.

But those stories are only a part of the station’s overall mix of news.

“We try to apply those same old journalism rules: Is it important? How many people does it affect?” says environmental reporter David Garcia, a former Latin American bureau chief for ABC News.

As Rios puts it: “This is a big city. And we should reflect it. Stories ultimately should resonate with as many people as possible.”