Celebrating Hispanic Heritage

In the Fall of 2014, the "TODAY Show" and Telemundo teamed up to launch "Viva TODAY", a week-long series that celebrated the richness and diversity of Hispanic culture.

The series highlighted Hispanic and Latino-American food, fashion, and style and featured special guest co-hosts, including MSNBC’s José Díaz-Balart and Telemundo’s Maria Celeste Arraras and Jorge Bernal.

MAKING HISTORY FOR HISPANIC PROGRAMMING

2014 was a banner year for live Hispanic programming at NBCUniversal. Emmy Award- winning veteran journalist José Díaz-Balart brings his passion, perspective, and 30 years’ experience covering the world’s biggest stories — in both English and Spanish — to the newsroom every day. MSNBC launched a one-hour live news show, "José Díaz-Balart," in July of 2014. By November, the show was expanded to two hours and renamed "The Rundown with José Díaz-Balart," airing weekdays from 9-11 a.m. ET from Miami.

TELEMUNDO

At YE 2014, the newsrooms of Telemundo consistently maintained a high percentage of people of color, both on air and behind the camera, at 98% diverse. This marked a slight improvement over YE 2013, where diversity was 95%. The triumph of Telemundo continues to prove our belief that talent, creativity and diversity of our people are our greatest resources.

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EXPANDING THE AUDIENCE

In an historic first, NBCUniversal-owned NBC and USA Network have piloted two Telemundo telenovelas in English, effectively bringing the classic Spanish-language telenovela concept to English-speaking U.S. audiences. NBC Entertainment is remaking the hit telenovela "El Señor de los Cielos", and USA Network is developing an adaptation of the forthcoming Telemundo telenovela "Mujer de Acero".

These pilots mark the latest collaborative effort to develop business and creative content opportunities across NBCUniversal’s entire family of networks and broaden our company’s mission to provide Hispanic content to an even broader diverse audience.