Telemundo

From Free net encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)

Revision as of 01:59, 20 April 2006
Azumanga1 (Talk | contribs)
/* Telemundo Network News */
Next diff →

Current revision

Telemundo is a U.S. television network based in Hialeah, Florida. It is the second largest Spanish language television network in the United States, second only to Univision. NBC Universal is the present parent company of the network.

1 History
2 Morning Wars
3 Telemundo Network News
4 2005 And Beyond
- 4.1 Logos
5 Stations
6 See also
7 External links

[edit]

History

Telemundo was originally founded by Angel Ramos, a Puerto Rican media entrepreneur, in 1952. It was Puerto Rico's first television network. Known as Telemundo Canal 2, it has been up until today a leader in Puerto Rican television. Its success eventually spawned the creation of a new, North American-based network to capture the growing Hispanic media market in the United States.

Saul Steinberg and Henry Silverman founded Telemundo Group Inc. in 1986 in the attempt to penetrate the Spanish language market of the United States. They purchased television stations in Los Angeles, California, Miami, Florida, and New York City. Noticiero Telemundo/HBC with Jorge Gestoso and Lana Montalban began broadcasting out of a warehouse in Hialeah.

The staff was made mostly of former Spanish International Network (now Univision) employees who defected the network when it was announced that Mexican television news anchor Jacobo Zabludosky would be heading north to anchor the newscast. This never happened, as Zabludosky stayed back in Mexico, but the cornerstone of what would become the second Hispanic broadcast network in the United States was laid. A year later Deportes Telemundo, a two-hour sports show, began airing nationally.

Between 1988 and 1991, the network expanded their distribution signal to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Washington state. The network then decided to outsource their news division in 1988 and hired CNN to produce 2 newscasts under the name of "Noticiero Telemundo CNN". It was anchored by transplanted to Atlanta, Jorge Gestoso and Miami native Maria Elvira Salazar.

Salazar left after her contract expired and returned to Miami to report for Noticiero Univision. In her place, CNN hired Miss Universe 1987 Cecilia Bolocco. Bolocco had no journalism experience having studied architecture in her native land. A year later, Bolocco was transferred to Miami to anchor a lifestyles program more atune with her skills called La Buena Vida.

In 1992, Telemundo went thru another management change this time under former Univision president Joaquin Blaya. Blaya brought in his Univision team in hopes of beating his former employer. Television shows were cancelled or merged. Longtime Telemundo executives were released and in 1993, Telemundo branded themselves with the campaign, Arriba, Telemundo, Arriba.

Bolocco saw her show merged with newsmagazine Ocurrió Así anchored by Enrique Gratas. Contacto, an afternoon women's magazine, was revamped as Club Telemundo. Two of its original anchors were fired. It kept Mexican soap star Rebecca Rambal as main hostess alongside new arrival Pedro Luis Garcia, a radio disc jockey from New York.

Gratas, Bolocco, Rambal and Guerra are no longer with the network; Gratas is now anchoring Noticiero Univision, Ultima Hora and Bolocco went back to her native Chile after starring in a soap opera Morelia and married former Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem. She gave birth to the couple's son in 2003. Rambal lives in Los Angeles and Garcia went back to NY to work for Telemundo affiliate WNJU-47.

Blaya and his employees incurred astronomical expenses without the much anticipated revenue, and then were terminated. Telemundo now found itself trying to reinvent themselves now under the leadership of Roland Hernandez.

In 1998, Telemundo was bought by a partnership between cable's Liberty Media and entertainment conglomerate Sony Pictures Entertainment. Helmed by yet another management team under the leadership of former CBS executive Peter Tortoricci, hopes of attracting the bilingual market were explored. Lo mejor de los dos Mundos ("The best of both worlds") campaign was launched. Several billboards went up in cities such as Miami and San Francisco heralding a "new era" for Telemundo.

This new executive team Peter Tortoricci, Rachel Wells, Alan Sokol and controversial programming executive Nely Galan. They decided to get away from the warehouse atmosphere of the production facilities base in working class Hialeah, FL, and moved their corporate offices to a posh address in at the Waterford Complex Santa Monica, California. At the time it was decided to produce Latino versions of popular American television shows owned by Sony. These included Charlie's Angels, One Day at a Time, and Starsky and Hutch.

The network also tried its luck by having a priest anchor a talk show. "Padre Alberto", Father Alberto Cutie, a Miami priest was tapped in to host this program. Sadly, this venture also failed. If Telemundo had any traces of ratings this experiment was the last nail on its coffin. Telemundo became the laughing stock of the industry. Ms. Galan's ideas nor shows were succesful in fact viewers left the network in droves. Local stations lost the little audience share they had and heads began to roll once again. The Tortoricci team was out and Jim MacNamara a former Universal Pictures executive born in Panama was hired to preside over embattled Telemundo.

MacNamara not only set up shop back in Hialeah, but also knew what he was doing. He went back to program what Hispanics wanted to watch: telenovelas. Under his leadership, Telemundo bought alternative programming from distributors from Brazil , Colombia and Mexico.

His strategy worked and U.S. Hispanics saw a new Telemundo emerging with hits such as "Xica de Silva", a Brazilian soap, and the most popular export from Colombia Soy Betty, la Fea. Pedro el Escamoso "El Clon", "Terra Nostra", followed and it seemed for a time that the network finally was able to compete. Local stations in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York added morning and weekend newscasts to be more competitive.

In 2001, Telemundo was purchased by NBC and is now a part of NBC Universal. Jim MacNamara, helmed the network during and after the sale. Their main competitor Univision, continues to have an upper hand in the ratings wars, however what separates Telemundo from Univision is that Telemundo has more original produced programming than Univision, and its mandate is still "100% Original". On February 27th, 2006, it was announced to NBC hired Nely Galan yet again to helm a division for the network based on the success of Hispanic soaps for the NBC Network. Only time will tell if Galan will succeed or if she will again, fail

In 2004, Telemundo began subtitling their telenovelas into English in the hopes of getting Hispanic Americans that did not speak Spanish to tune in. Subtitles are broadcast by using closed captioning. All of Telemundo's telenovelas are also closed captioned in Spanish. However, in order to activate the captions in English, viewers have to tune the caption to CC3, a closed-caption channel not available on most televisions.

[edit]

Morning Wars

In 1997, after years of showing children's programming, Telemundo started producing its own morning show in hopes of beating Univision's long running hit Despierta America. It began with a Spanish language version of CBS News This Morning called Esta Manana. It was anchored by former CBS News morning anchor Jose Diaz Balart (brother of a U.S. Congress Representative for the state of Florida, Lincoln Diaz Balart), Rogelio Mora-Tagle did the news segments,and Mexican hostess Gloria Calzada was brought up from Mexico City. This venture lasted two years before being cancelled by yet another morning show: De Mananita.

"De Mananita" was mainly known for having more anchors than any port in the United States: It was anchored by Mexicans Pita Ojeda, former singer Luisa Fernanda, Comedian Ricky Luis, journalist Max Aub, (all were from Home Shopping Español) and anchor of a sunday newsmagazine show on televisa (which aired on Univision) Fernando del Rincon. The only non Mexican in this bunch was a former CBS Telenoticias anchor; Spaniard Marian De la Fuente. De la Fuente came to Telemundo to anchor the ill fated 24 hour news service, then very popular in the Spanish television world of the early 90's. Another service broadcasted in Latin America competing with Telenoticias was "Canal de Noticias NBC" and "CNN en Espanol", anchored by Jorge Gestoso, who used to be the Telemundo news anchor.

The service was called Telenoticias. Marian became one of the most popular faces in the broadcast. Her Spanish accent long thought to be a deterrant, in fact became a winning strategy to De la Fuente during her time at Telemundo. That, and her big luxurious hairstyles and sexy outfits, became topics of conversation among gossip magazines published in the United States. De la Fuente in turn became the face of morning news at Telemundo and covered important events such as the first anniversary of the Terrorist Attacks to the World Trade Center in New York in 2002. She wrote a book about her experiences as a journalist covering the attacks.

This show lasted until summer 2004 when after many host changes, including the exits of Del Rincon who went on to be a co-presenter of Univision's tabloid show, "Primer Impacto", and Luisa Fernanda then shipped to the gossip show "Cotorrendo". Behind the scenes, things were more dramatic: a barrage of drama which included the firing and quitting of executive producers. By then, the last original anchor Pita Ojeda also left Telemundo in a dispute with management over wanting to do some outside projects like other network personalities were allowed to do so. It was also noted that she was unhappy with the direction of the program which went from three hours to one hour to accommodate a new morning show, called "Hoy en el Mundo". This program was yet anchored by Marian de la Fuente and the now resurfed Jose Diaz Balart. At the end, both shows "Hoy", and "De Mananita" were both cancelled. These shows were dead on arrival and nothing Telemundo producers conceived was able to knockoff Univision's breakfast show "Despierta América"., ("Wake up, America").

In 2005 Telemundo got a new president, Don Browne whom replaced MacNamara. He hired away María Antonieta Collins from Univision (who had in turn worked for Televisa for many years), a weekend Univision news anchor to helm a new three hour news/features morning show to replace both "Hoy en el Mundo" and "De Mañanita" and relaunch it with the name of "Cada Dia con Maria Antonieta".

"Hoy en el Mundo" lead anchor Marian De La Fuente who was asked to join the new morning show as a news reader, but decided to as well leave the network, leaving the news portions to be done by Jose Diaz Balart.

[edit]

Telemundo Network News

In 1994, another failed experiment took place at Telemundo. Tired of having CNN dictating how to cover their newscast, Telemundo decided to launch Telenoticias. Telenoticias was a 24-hour news feed service aimed to viewers in Latin America. The service was to be owned by Reuters, Antena 3 of Spain, and Artear Network from Argentina. A newscast was produced for the U.S audience as well, anchored by Raul Peimbert and Denisse Oller.

Within 2 years, Oller was gone and ironically replaced by Maria Elvira Salazar. Years later the network went thru another phase when CBS Network decided to get involved in the Latin news game and bought the network rebranding it "CBS Telenoticias". This also failed; CBS decided to sell this venture to a group from Mexico named Medcom. Medcom owned various radio ventures but did not know how anything about 24-hour news.

Things got so bad that once payroll was not met and executives had to beg employees to finish the workweek. Finally, Telemundo which was leaving bankruptcy court decided to invest a reportedly 5 million dollars and bought the service from Medcom, rebranding the 24-hour news service, Telemundo Internacional.

By the time this happened both Peimbert and Salazar were gone replaced by Guillermo Dezcalzi and Ana Patricia Candiani. Dezcalzi left shortly and Pedro Sevecq who used to have a talk show on Telemundo saw his dream come true when he was asked to co-anchor the program. The newsprogram went through another metamorphosis when it was reported that Candiani would be fired from the newscast to leave Uruguayan Pedro Sevecq as sole anchor for the network. Candiani would end up as a correspondent for "Cada Dìa", but rejoin Sevec for Telemundo's Sunday newsmagazine Sin Fronteras).

The name "Telenoticias" came from the newscast of WKAQ-TV, Telemundo in Puerto Rico, where it is used since 1954 to the present.

[edit]

2005 And Beyond

The network was the first Spanish language broadcaster to broadcast NBA Games with La NBA/WNBA en Telemundo until 2005 when those rights went to ABC/Disney owned ESPN Deportes.

The network produces more than 50 percent of its content in the United States. Much of the rest of the shows are imported from Mexico and other Latin American countries such as Brazil and Colombia. Mexican TV broadcaster TV Azteca has been the main provider of Mexican telenovelas produced by Producciones Argos. Now separated from TV Azteca (because they launched a Spanish language network), Argos has produced telenovelas directly for Telemundo, such as the hit Gitanas.

Telemundo also brought the Olympics to Hispanic viewers as well. Overhyped by the new management, as the salvation of the network Telemundo saw modest results after the Athens Olympics. Because of this failure, Telemundo broadcasted minimum coverage of the 2006 winter olympics in Turin, Italy as part of its Deportes Telemundo reports.

Deportes Telemundo continues to broadcast monthly boxing matches, as well as futbol (soccer) including the Mexico vs. USA battles, and the weekend sportscast Titulares Telemundo at 11pm (or after local news on certain Telemundo stations).

On January 9, Telemundo launched a new afternoon block with the arrival of Mexican soap star Laura León known as "La Tesorito", and her talk show Señora León. The show is taped in Peru and broadcasted to the U.S. Added to the schedule was a pseudo dating game show from Los Angeles called 12 Corázonès, complete with an astrologer and a former singer. Both shows have not proven to be hits yet in the key markets of Miami and New York.

On April 5th,a Mexican production company Grupo Xtra and Telemundo announced the creation of two new companies: The production company, Estudios Mexicanos Telemundo, will produce content in Mexico for exhibition in Mexico, as well as in Spanish-speaking markets in the United States and in Latin America The second company, Palmas 26, has been created to identify strategic growth opportunities in the Mexican television industry.

[edit]