Detroit’s Univision TV affiliate names Tejana as General Manager

By Alan Abrams
La Prensa Senior Correspondent

DETROIT: Univision’s Detroit television affiliate, WUDT-TV, has named Latina broadcast veteran Jessica S. Pellegrino as the station’s General Manager. WUDT-TV is owned by Equity Broadcasting of Little Rock, Arkansas, ranked as the ninth largest broadcast company in the United States. 

Broadcasting on Channel 23, WUDT-TV last year became the first Detroit-area television station to offer daily local news broadcasts in Spanish.

Pellegrino was previously the station’s director of government and community affairs.

Born in Laredo, Texas, Pellegrino moved with her family to San Antonio when she was 12. “I still have family in both cities,” she says. Her parents are César and Alice Cano.

An experienced veteran of the broadcasting industry, Pellegrino spent about a dozen years working in many aspects of radio and television broadcasting.  While living in Texas, she worked at SER National in Dallas.

Pellegrino has lived and worked in Detroit since Feb. 1992, and most of her broadcast experience in Michigan has been in marketing and corporate development.

During a telephone interview this weekend, she told La Prensa that the station’s production and news reporting is done locally and then transmitted to Equity’s headquarters in Little Rock, where the local newscasts are prepared for their Univision affiliates.

“Our news team covers three or four stories locally every day which we send to Little Rock by computer. That’s where the newscasters do weather, sports and news for six different markets. Every newscast is tailored to the market, and the news is fed to Little Rock by computer daily. Our reporter is in cell phone contact with the control room in Little Rock,” explains Pellegrino.
 

Equity Broadcasting has 125 employees in Little Rock. The company, which also owns several professional sports teams, produces all the news for the 52 television stations they own and operate.

Every station in the group has its own general manager, sales department, and handles production of their local commercials. Pellegrino says she is not alone in being a woman at the top of the operation. She believes many of the general managers at Equity Broadcasting are female because women have long occupied the key internal positions in radio and television broadcasting from their traditional role in traffic through sales and operations.

WUDT Univision produces two local information and public affairs shows each week including Informando, hosted by Alma Lara and Gustavo Potes. Pellegrino says recent guests have included New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and Michigan’s Governor Jennifer Granholm.

Jessica S. Pellegrino

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The station also takes an activist stance for the Latino community, says Pellegrino. “We are currently conducting a voter registration drive because we stress to our viewers that government and the political parties pay attention to us and our issues when we vote,” she explains. Other key issues for Pellegrino and the station are Michigan’s Affirmative Action initiative and the building of the wall on the Mexican-US border.

Pellegrino’s rise at Univision parallels the growth of Latino media nationwide. She says the Latino population in Grand Rapids has grown by 300 percent and Detroit has seen a 44 percent increase. And she has the economic statistics to bolster her case.

“Latinos open new businesses at a rate three times as great as the (rest of the) population,” says Pellegrino.

Divorced, she has three children: Michael, 24, who lives in San Antonio; Margaret, 20, who is a pre-med student at Wayne State University; and a 17-year-old son, A.J., who is a junior in high school.