NBC, Telemundo Making News Plans

As networks explore ways to get more mileage out of their news divisions, NBC is charting ambitious plans for integrating its operations with those of Telemundo, the U.S.’ second-largest Spanish-language broadcaster, after the anticipated completion of its $2.7-billion acquisition next month.

The two sides have been meeting regularly to determine where cooperation is possible, hoping to help Telemundo take on Spanish-language ratings leader Univision while extending NBC’s resources on the U.S.-Mexican border and in Latin America.

Because of the language barrier and other issues, the network news operations can find only limited ways to share.

Viewers will see the biggest difference at many of Telemundo’s TV stations, which will add local news programming if they don’t already have it.

In Los Angeles, where Telemundo’s KVEA-TV does offer local news, one option under consideration is pooling the station’s resources with KNBC-TV to operate from a single facility, said Ramon Escobar, the MSNBC executive overseeing the news integration process for NBC.

Roughly a third of Telemundo’s correspondents in the Caribbean and Latin America speak English well enough to appear on NBC, Escobar said, providing NBC News an expanded presence in the region. The idea of airing translated versions of each other’s stories has been largely rejected, although the two sides are talking about joint projects with separate interviews and shared video.

“We can’t assimilate to the point where each side loses its identity,” he said.

Telemundo correspondents such as Jose Diaz-Balart, who previously worked at CBS News, are more likely to appear on NBC than vice versa.

Only a few NBC correspondents--including MSNBC’s Rick Sanchez, who went to the cable network from a local station in Miami--speak Spanish well enough to file on-air reports for Telemundo, executives say.

Other hurdles include dealing with different union contracts and fear among Telemundo employees that they will be treated as second-class citizens, and accommodating different newsroom cultures. Even little details, such as the practice in some Telemundo newsrooms of regularly delivering cups of espresso to employees’ desks, have come into play.

Unlike the savings NBC derives from its cable news channel MSNBC, the financial benefits on the network side will be limited to combining some bureaus and possibly sharing camera people or satellite time when, say, the pope visits Mexico.

Like NBC, Telemundo provides a good deal of network news, including three hours in the morning, a one-hour afternoon newsmagazine, a half-hour nightly newscast and a prime-time newsmagazine, while operating at a fraction of NBC News’ annual budget.

When Escobar was an executive producer at Telemundo’s New York station, he said, he had to cover the community with a single truck that could transmit live. NBC plans to make sure the Telemundo stations have more live trucks, which he called “a huge tool to go into communities where we need to be. If we’re going to be hyper-local, we’ve got to be out where things are happening.... We really want Telemundo to be a news destination, and we will make news a big priority.”