United by Diversity

MIAMI —  Trying to define the nation’s burgeoning Latino population is a little like trying to describe an elephant: Your opinion will depend largely on what part of it you’re looking at.

In Miami, for example, the Latino community is predominantly Cuban, middle-aged and politically conservative. In Los Angeles, it’s young, Mexican and politically progressive.

And let’s not even bring up New York.

“We’re a people divided by a common language,” says Tony Hernandez, president of Radio Caracol, which provides Spanish-language programming to more than 100 stations across the country. “If you try to mix too much, it’s like a feathered fish--it can’t swim and it can’t fly.”

Trying to find unity in that diversity was a problem that promised to sink Radio Unica when the Miami-based broadcaster launched the nation’s only full-time Spanish-language radio network. But in the intervening 16 months, the network has actually grown, increasing by a third the number of stations carrying its talk and news programming, making it available in more than 83% of Latino households nationwide. Programming has grown more diverse in recent months with the addition of well-known personalities such as television talk-show hostess Cristina Saralegui and veteran journalist Maria Elena Salinas.

So now Heftel Broadcasting Corp.--which owns 40 Spanish-language radio stations, including KSCA-FM (101.9) and KLVE-FM (107.5), the Los Angeles-Orange County market’s two top-rankedstations--has launched a network of its own. The Heftel circuit, an internal network offering up to 12 hours of programming a day, began in January and has grown to include 12 stations in nine of the country’s top 15 Latino markets. Advertisers, however, can place spots on all 40 of the company’s stations with one order, giving their message a national reach comparable to ads on Radio Unica.

But despite some basic similarities, the two networks are as different as fish and fowl. Radio Unica distributes 24 hours of mostly Miami-produced content to nearly 60 affiliates every day, while Heftel offers its members limited, mostly regionally targeted fare designed to supplement each station’s local programming.

“This is mainly an advertising vehicle,” says Richard Heftel, president of three HBC stations in Los Angeles.

“We’re not trying to tell somebody in one of our markets that they can just walk away from the station and we’ll send them programming 24 hours a day,” adds David Gleason, vice president of AM programming for the Heftel network. “We think that’s a disservice.”

That’s pretty much what Radio Unica is telling the owned-and-operated stations in its network, however. Although most of them carry locally produced news and weather briefs, the vast majority of the network’s programming is sent directly to local transmitters from a state-of-the-future facility in suburban Miami.

The broadcasts originate from a simple, unmarked two-story building that passers-by often mistake for an apartment complex, but that humble exterior hides a 21st-century digital studio with the technology to produce and distribute 14 national programs simultaneously. Even Radio Unica’s flagship station, which is housed in the same building, is basically an unmanned computer terminal that quietly monitors the network’s programming, automatically inserting local ads and station IDs in the appropriate spots. (In Los Angeles, Radio Unica can be heard on KVCA-AM [670] and KBLA-AM [1580].)

“The network cannot be that efficient if we have 100 people working at every one of our radio stations,” says Roy Pressman, Radio Unica’s vice president of engineering. “It just doesn’t work that way. And that is the trend that broadcasters have. Let’s try to consolidate, let’s maximize profits. Let’s look at the personnel we need and the personnel we don’t need.”

Radio Unica’s programming philosophy borrows liberally from the network television model, believing that good, centrally produced programming will succeed regardless of market differences.

“There is a formula, and for the most part I think that we have it,” says network President Jose C. Cancela, a former executive with the Telemundo and Univision television networks. “What does ‘local’ mean? It means you’re able to touch a fiber in someone’s life. It’s as important to somebody in Miami as it is to somebody in Egypt.”

Not everyone is sold, of course. Despite a recent buying spree that netted Radio Unica stations in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Phoenix, the network has lost some outlets in recent months. Denver affiliate KBNO-AM (1220) said it will join the exodus when its contract expires later this month.

The Heftel team, conversely, believes in local programming so strongly it is running its Miami-based talk show primarily on East Coast stations while Renan Almendarez Coello’s irreverent morning show--produced at Los Angeles station KSCA--is heard almost exclusively on stations in the Southwest. In the evenings, the network offers a deep pool of stringers to affiliated AM stations for local sports-talk shows.

“We believe that radio is a local business,” said Doug Darfield, the Heftel network’s research director. “We’re trying to keep in mind [that] things don’t work well across the country. We’re building a network, the principle of which is respecting the diversity of the Hispanic market on a region by region basis.”

Regardless of philosophy, however, both networks will live and die with the local ratings because there is no complete survey tracking radio listening nationally--a fact that actually works to both sides’ advantage. The Heftel network gets a boost because, while it lacks the breadth of its rival, it includes mammoth stations that rank among the top three Spanish-language broadcasters in four of the nation’s top six markets. And Radio Unica, which has a relatively tiny audience overall, benefits because its strength has proven to be less-populous markets that most of the Spanish-language media had ignored.

According to the most recent Arbitron report, Radio Unica has had little impact in many urban centers, drawing a significant audience only in San Francisco. In Miami, the network’s station was 12th out of 13 Spanish-language outlets; in El Paso, it finished behind a Mexican station that aired no U.S. content; in Los Angeles, it doesn’t rank among the top 43 stations in the market two months into the winter recording period; and in four other big markets its member stations did not rank at all in the audience survey.

But the network has gained a toehold in some smaller markets. That, combined with the fact the network controls 58% of its broadcast affiliates, has drawn the attention of advertisers looking for a way to reach Latino consumers outside major metropolitan areas.

“When you look at individual affiliates of Radio Unica, some of them are doing surprisingly well,” adds Laura Marella of Casanova Pendrill, an Irvine-based Latino ad agency. “They’re not doing double digits, they’re certainly not the numbers that some of the Heftel stations are doing right now, but they do have some local market successes.”

It’s far too early to call either network an overall success--the limited programming of the 3-month-old Heftel circuit can be heard in just a third of its potential markets, while Radio Unica’s recent flurry of station acquisitions and upgrades has left it more than $100 million in debt.

In fact, simply trying to define success for Spanish-language network radio can be difficult since no one has achieved it before.

“No network has ever survived,” says Arturo Villar, editor of the influential Hispanic Market Weekly newsletter. “So if these people come in now with money . . . and they fail, then the category will be dead for a long, long time. So I think it would do tremendous harm.

“On the other hand, if they both make it, it would signal that radio is really alive in the Hispanic market.”