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Richard Kelley, of NBC 7 / KNSD and Telemundo 20

Richard Kelley

Richard Kelley, who oversees NBCUniversal’s Owned Television Stations division in San Diego, has been with the company since 2008. Previously vice president of sales at KNTV, an NBC station in the San Francisco Bay Area, Kelley came to San Diego in 2010 as president and general manager of NBC San Diego.

As of this month, the number of NBCUniversal stations he oversees has gone from one, NBC 7 / KNSD, to two with the addition of Telemundo 20, San Diego’s new Spanish-language local news station.

Before launching its own station in San Diego, Telemundo had been an affiliate of Entravision as Telemundo 33. Part of NBCUniversal’s Owned Television Stations division, the Spanish-language network has 17 local television stations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico and supports 53 affiliates across the country.

Sabrina Lopez, who held sales positions of increasing responsibility for the division, was named Telemundo 20’s vice president of sales in June. The station broadcasts out of NBCUniversal’s news facility in Kearny Mesa. The news team, which does four 30-minute live newscasts each weekday at 5 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 6 p.m. and 11 p.m., debuted July 3. Its news anchors are Lizzet Lopez and Guadalupe Venegas; Ana Cristina Sanchez is the weather anchor and MJ Acosta is the station’s sports anchor.

Of the launch of the new station, “I’ve been doing this a really long time, but this is one of the most exciting moments I’ve ever had in the broadcast business,” Kelley said in a recent interview with the San Diego Business Journal.

Here is part of the interview, which has been edited for clarity:

Q: What was the impetus for launching Telemundo 20?

A: It came about a few years ago as part of NBC Universal’s investment in local properties and local news. We bought and built this beautiful facility in Kearny Mesa with a lot of space, and I think it got the powers that be thinking about what else we could do here. The affiliation deal here in San Diego was to expire June 30, 2017, so the plan started to be laid a few years back to add Telemundo to our offerings here.


Q: What business opportunities are available in Spanish language-speaking broadcasting?

A: One of the reasons the company has put so much money behind this is because the future is just so incredibly bright with Spanish-speaking audience and news. It’s a big market, the 13th ranked TV market for Spanish-language television.

We also saw this as a great opportunity to kind of expand our footprint in the market. To have both NBC 7 and Telemundo 20 gives us incredible reach and power, to go from delivering to one audience to multiple audiences.

Q: What’s been the reception of the station and its digital elements?

A: We launched our digital product on June 1, our website and our news app. That was the first Spanish-language news app in the market and we saw immediate results from doing that. The audience was very engaged.

We launched our first newscast (July 3) at 5 p.m. and the results have far exceeded even our expectations. We are a very, very strong No. 1 across the board, which is very unusual for a new station. We’re doing two hours of local news a day, which is more than what the previous station was doing by half an hour. Our 5 to 6:30 p.m. local news block is far and away No. 1 in that first week with households by well over 50 percent. Our late news is also doing well; we won a couple nights last week.

Usually when you launch you say let’s be competitive, let’s get a great product on the air. To launch at No. 1 … we kind of achieved that in the first week, so from this point moving forward (we plan) to keep the momentum going. We were the No. 1 Spanish-speaking language TV station last week for total week and also in prime, so that’s a nice way to start off.

Q: What has it been like to balance two news teams?

A: All of our reporters and anchors on Telemundo 20 are bilingual and the last several we’ve hired on the NBC 7 side have been bilingual, as well, so when I talk about the footprint it’s not just to say we’re going to have more audience, more viewers … but from a news reporting and gathering capability, one plus one is going to equal three. Every day last week, we had a Telemundo or NBC reporter report for the other station. So if we’re covering news in North County and if there something breaks and NBC 7 is there, in all likelihood we can turn in a report for Telemundo 20, as well. The goal all along has been one newsroom, two stations. All of our news people are working together, and I think that’s what’s really going to pay tremendous dividends for the market. We realized we had such synergy that you could take existing infrastructure and add new staff to it; that’s a win-win for us, a winwin for our viewers and it’s a win-win for our clients.

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