The Univision 2019 upfront presentation takes place on Monday evening, and yesterday morning, we attended an invite-only Univision pre-upfront press briefing to learn what’s on tap.
Network executives, including Univision CEO Vince Sadusky, announced a ton of new programming for the summer and fall 2019 on Univision, Univision Deportes (now known as TUDN), Televisa, and UniMás, the latter of which will now focus on live programming. Live sports, live unscripted, and yes, live news.
UniMás is launching nightly newscast that will air in prime time, anchored by veteran TV news journalists Enrique Acevedo and Patricia Janiot.
Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna becomes the only national network newscast that will air in the 10 p.m. hour, and launches Monday May 13.
But is there enough interest among the Hispanic American community in a national nightly newscast in prime time? Univision seems to believe there is.
“We see the 10 p.m. UniMás time period as critical because we know that there’s a whole slew of our consumer base who may not want to wait until 11:30 p.m. to watch news,” said Univision CMO and president of entertainment programming Jessica Rodriguez. “That’s also very much the Latin culture, to have a prime time news program.”
The 10 p.m. newscast on UniMás joins Univision’s flagship evening newscast, Noticiero Univision, co-anchored by Jorge Ramos and Ilia Calderón , as well as Univision’s Sunday public affairs program hosted by Ramos, Al Punto, as part of what’s become a pretty robust lineup of Spanish language news programming across the Univision networks.
“If past is prologue, our community will be a play pivotal role in the upcoming 2020 presidential election,” Univision president of ad sales and marketing Steve Mandala said during the briefing.
We asked the powers that who took the stage at New York’s Langham Hotel on Tuesday about how they’re funding quality broadcast journalism in a time when news and journalism are under fire. Univision News president Daniel Coronell was not present for the briefing, but the company’s CEO and CMO were able to provide us with compelling answers.
SADUSKY: I can speak on behalf of the magnificent news organization. When I came to this organization, I quickly recognized that the news organization was a real competitive advantage. A lot of the major networks do a fine job, but they’ve reeled back a lot of their bureaus and visions and all that over the years. It’s just a fact, resource reallocation and all of that. For us, this company has been amazing in terms of its bureaus throughout this country, in Latin America, its partnerships, its network of stringers. These folks are amazing journalists. Their willingness to hop on a plane and go to the highest level, and not be armchair quarterbacks, and get to places like Venezuela and hot spots in Mexico and all of the immigration stories that have been broken.
From a political perspective, it’s important for the credibility of our news organization to be involved. So, we pursue the debates, and have been involved in the debates in the past. These are things we’ll continue to do. It’s really important for us to bring the issues in a very clear and concise way to our community.
I think it’s really important for our community for to get the recognition as a powerful voting force. Historically, Hispanic America has been strong in certain areas but like Florida, but hasn’t shown up in the kind of numbers that we would have hoped, and it hasn’t really paralleled the amazing growth that the population has had in the marketplace for a bunch of reasons. But, Univision has done an incredible job of getting out the vote campaign over many years, and we were really excited to see this past election as a really a tipping point. We got the certified voting results in and as we mentioned, as we had an educational day in DC last week for political agencies and parties, demonstrating that the turnout was magnificent and illustrating example after example of folks who won as a result of speaking to our community, and lost as a result of ignoring this community. So, we’re excited because there’s good business behind this powerful community and we’ll continue to do our part to inform our community who really over-indexes in terms their desire to consume news and information and Univision serves as a very, very important place.
RODRIGUEZ: On the point of super-serving and giving the audience what it wants – we’re very proud of the fact that from a programming perspective, news plays a critical role. We’ve actually expanded our news programming hours. We have our four hours Despierta América news product. Then, at Noon we are the only network that has a newscast, both on linear and digital, and we have expanded that to local markets as well. Now we have this 10 p.m. UniMás time period, which is critical, because we know that there’s a whole slew of our consumer base who may not want to wait until 11:30 p.m. to watch news. That’s also very much the Latin culture, to have a prime time news program. And Sundays, we have [newsmagazines] Aquí y Ahora and Crónicas; those are just examples of how we continue to invest in news and news programming hours, as opposed to what our competitors are doing.