Local news on Telemundo return to San Antonio today after a 6 year absence. KVDA’s “Telenoticias San Antonio” will air in HD Monday – Friday at 5 and 10 pm. Esmeralda Medellín will anchor both half-hour newscasts. Esmeralda was previously been a reporter and anchor in Dallas and Chicago for both Univision and Telemundo.
Jaime Becerril will be doing sports and Lilian Perez will cover weather and entertainment. Reporters Ciro Villarreal, Mayde Gomez, Gerardo Moreno, and Geraldine Ortega round up the news talent team.
María Elena Cruz, who previously worked at Telemundo San Antonio, will produce the evening newscasts. Before rejoining KVDA, she was promotions producer at WOAI, the NBC affiliate in San Antonio and the Editor-in-Chief of La Prensa de San Antonio.
News Director Johnny Cordoba is leading the team. He most recently worked in Albuquerque as Assignment Desk Manager for KRQE and KASA, a CBS & Fox duopoly station, and at Univision’s KLUZ as Executive Producer.
It has been six years since NBCU-Telemundo eliminated local newscasts in several top 10 markets, including San Antonio, to create a hubbed regionalized newscast run by the Telemundo Production Center (TPC) out of Dallas. That model did not work and the network, under the direction of then Telemundo Station Group president Ron Gordon, started reincorporating local newscasts in some of those markets.
Telemundo affiliate station group ZGS Communications currently operates San Antonio’s KVDA, which it leased from Telemundo in 2009.