Noticias Univision Costa Central, Santa Maria’s only Spanish-language local television newscast, is scheduled to go off the air December 15th.
The station serves 230,000 Latino households in the Central Coast.
Even though in 2010 it had the highest ratings of any news program on the Central Coast, beating perennial winner KEYT, it has been losing money for three years.
Blanca Figueroa, news director, anchor and reporter for KPMR-38, an Entravision-owned station, sent out an email to community leaders this week informing them that the station’s general manager, Gabe Quiroz, intended on shutting down the newscast due to financial problems.
According to the Santa Barbara Independent, Blanca has asked the GM for a 15-day extension, hoping she can find sponsors to keep the 6 pm weekday newscast on the air, save the jobs of her 5 member staff and “preserve the primary source of information for many of the region’s Spanish speakers.”
KPMR’s newscast launched in 2003.
12/12 UPDATE: An Entravision PR rep now says the newscast’s last day is Dec. 30.
Actually Santa Maria/Santa Barbara also has KTAS-33 Telemundo has a local newscast at 6pm as well, not only Univision. Sad to hear there news though
Erick is totally right. I will go even further, the original Noticias Univision was in fact what today is KTAS it started back in 1989 and has since kept itself up. The question here I believe is not so much the news to be true…they had several sponsors, but the fact that the other channel that Entravision manages here locally has in fact had very few anouncers here locally Telefutura. I rarely see a local announcement there. Obviously if you are loosing money u want to make cuts, where to make cuts well the first place you look for is where there is staff so it was the news that got chopped off…this is a gamble for Entravision.
I say the blame is on Telefutura, why? because both of the local newscasts have about the same amount of anouncers during their time. All things equal then we would be talking also of KTAS also having trouble even harder than KPMR…but this is not the case. This is why I strongly believe that the losses do not come from the news only the logical subject of losses is Telefutura.
At any rate I laud this staff who did the community much good. however there will still be news in Spanish for the Central Coast and I am sure enyone wishing to have their events published will go ahead and be well recieved at KTAS….
Too sad. If anybody is interested, Telemundo Dallas has a couple of availabilities for our upcoming weekend newscast.
PARA SOLICITAR VISITA http://www.nbcunicareers.com/ Y UTILIZA LOS NUMEROS CORRESPONDIENTES A CADA POSICION PARA SOLICITARLA. TAMBIEN HAY OTRAS POSICIONES DE MEDIO TIEMPO.
– Anchor/VJ 3291BR
– Assignment Editor 3292BR
– Video Journalist 3293BR
– News Producer 3295BR
– Technical Director 3296BR