CNN Latino ceases operations in U.S. Hispanic

CNN announced this week it will cease operations of its U.S. Hispanic project, CNN Latino.“CNN Latino was a bold effort to continue CNN’s commitment to the U.S. Hispanic marketplace. Unfortunately, despite the great efforts of many talented people, CNN Latino was not able to fulfill our business expectations and we are discontinuing the programming this month. Over the course of the past year we learned a lot and we will use what we learned to continue to innovate and evolve our presence in the Hispanic community”, said an official company memo to PRODU.PRODU spoke about the closing with Gabriel Llaurado, VP and General Manager of station WBQM-LD Channel 3 New York, a CNN Latino affiliate. He said the CNN Latino shutdown was “unexpected.”Llaurado said the New York station fulfilled all of its contractual obligations of distribution, original programing and sales, but unfortunately, the decision to cease operations caught them by surprise.However, he added that BuenaVisión TV, which is a parallel project of the group led by Carlos Barba, will continue to move forward both nationally and internationally. Llaurado said that in the coming weeks, BuenaVisión TV will announce new developments. Barba and his team recently signed a deal with Olympusat for pay-TV distribution of their programming.