18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JANUARY 29-FEBRUARY 4, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com Less than six months after KION-Telemundo 23 abruptly closed its local newsroom, Telemundo 23’s Facebook page still shows an image of Sandy Santos, Telemundo’s journalist, behind the news desk, with a backdrop showing the Salinas downtown arch. The last post is a goodbye from Santos thanking viewers. “Today marks the end of a chapter in the life of our local channel, in our Spanish-language news coverage for the MontereySalinas region,” Santos said in Spanish, signaling the turning off of another Spanish news outlet in the region on Sept. 25, 2025. Tuesday morning, Sept. 23, had started out like a normal day at KIONTelemundo 23. Reporters started their shifts by grabbing a cup of coffee, checking in with sources and preparing a list of pitches for the news meeting, while others were getting ready to be on the road chasing a story. During the meeting, they all learned they were being fired—the local newsroom was closing. Over recent years, the number of English- and Spanish-language journalists across TV, radio and print has decreased significantly. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, Latino immigrants are most likely to watch news in Spanish, 41 percent, while only 2 percent of U.S.-born Latinos watch the news in Spanish. In Monterey County, about 55 percent of the population speaks a language other than English at home, with Spanish being the most common. “Newsrooms are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and at the same time, one person is doing more tasks than having two or three people doing that job,” says Santos, who was a reporter, producer and anchor at Telemundo 23. Santos also wrote stories for the website, translated and dubbed audio in English for the sister station as well. The newscast team was two full-time positions compared to 15.5 for its English counterpart, KION. The advantage of having two newscasts is that they can share information and expand local coverage; although other times, the small Spanish team pushed through to get enough content for their newscast. “We didn’t really have enough resources in the Spanish portion,” Santos says. Journalists and reporters for Spanish media must have proficiency in both English and Spanish, something that isn’t necessarily required in English-only media. Santos and other former TV talent have mentioned their workload was higher, but their pay was lower than that of their KION counterparts, with gaps of up to $20,000. According to research conducted in 2019 by Fundamedios, a nonprofit based in Ecuador and the U.S. that monitors, promotes and fights for freedom of expression, Latinos experience lower salaries and inferior working conditions. Erandi Garcia Escareño, who worked at Univision 67 in Monterey, El Sol de Salinas and Telemundo 48 in the Bay Area, says expectations for reporters in Spanish are higher and must perform several tasks at the same time. During her time at Univision, she anchored the 6pm newscast and was the news director. Before Covid, the country had an estimated 624 Latino news media outlets, 91 of them were in California. Last year, Univision left Portland and Telemundo left the Central Coast, leaving tens of thousands of people with less access to news in Spanish. Spanish-language news not just on TV but also in print and on the radio has dwindled. Growing up, Santos says watching the news was part of her family’s daily routine. She remembers newspapers such as La Bamba and El Sol de Salinas, a weekly newspaper published by the Salinas Californian, folding. Currently, local written content in Spanish is sporadically published on Monterey County Now and Voices of Monterey Bay, a bilingual online outlet. Delia Saldivar is Radio Bilingüe’s regional manager. She has been in Monterey County since the ’80s and she says Spanish-language news coverage has shrunk over the years, noting Univision used to have a weekend edition. (Old photos show a team of at least seven people including producers, reporters and anchors at Univision.) “They just keep one reporter that covers five minutes of news per day,” Saldivar says. “It has a big impact, because people are getting the information from social media, and sometimes that information is not accurate.” Last year, a raid on a Pajaro cannabis farm caused fear and chaos among the immigrant population, after videos and photos of law enforcement in North County fields circulated on social media. Many people thought it was a federal immigration-related crackdown. Escareño says the station had a staff of nine people when she started in the 2000s; a similar number remained in 2015 after Univision closed its sister station in Santa Maria (in Santa Barbara County). Univision 67, now called Univision Costa Central, expanded its coverage from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara and had at least one local reporter in that region. In 2023, Telemundo 23 consolidated and expanded its coverage to Ventura County. Eventually, in 2017, most decision-making and production for Univision 67 were moved to El Paso, Texas and eventually to San Diego. San Diego manages and produces newscasts in a region including Palm Springs, the Central Coast and YumaEl Centro in Arizona. All reporters turned into “multimedia journalists,” meaning instead of a two-person team doing the work, each journalist is a one-person band from start to finish: gathering information, writing the script, editing the video, doing promos and posting it online. TUNED OUT Many Spanish-only speakers prefer to watch or listen to their news. But locally, those options are drying up. By Celia Jiménez Sandy Santos, above, was a reporter/anchor/journalist of many hats at Telemundo 23 until it closed in 2025. She focused on South County, which has a large Latino and Indigenous population. Even when the station had a local newsroom, she says, “I don’t feel that we had enough coverage.” Below: Delia Saldivar at the Salinas station of Radio Bilingüe where she is a host of the program Comunidad Alerta. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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