By FishbowlLA Staff
A quiet week on the newspaper side, a loud one everywhere else. Nielsen dropped the August book on Tuesday and handed Los Angeles radio one of its odder headlines in half a century; the Television Academy spent the weekend giving out 100-odd statuettes downtown before Monday’s main event; and Telemundo 52 quietly poached a producer from ABC7. Here’s the week in LA media.
A 48-year high on the LA dial, and a news/talk slide underneath it
Nielsen released the August PPM book (July 23 – August 19) for Los Angeles on Tuesday, and the number that jumped out belongs to a station that does not, on paper, do anything remarkable: iHeartMedia’s Hot AC “104.3 My-FM” KBIG stretched its lead from a 6.2 to a 6.7. RadioInsight’s Lance Venta relayed ratings analyst Chris Huff’s read that it is KBIG’s biggest share since January/February 1978, back when 104.3 was a Beautiful Music station. iHeart’s 103.5 KOST (5.7) and Audacy’s K-Earth 101 (5.7) tied for a distant second.
The more consequential story is underneath. iHeart News/Talk 640 KFI has now slid three books running, 4.5 to 4.4 to 3.9 — a rough stretch for what has long been the market’s dominant spoken-word signal. Audacy’s Sports “97.1 The Fan” KNX-FM inched from a 0.2 to a 0.3. And Spanish-language radio had the best month of anyone: Univision’s 107.5 K-Love KLVE climbed 3.3–3.6–4.1, SBS Regional Mexican 97.9 La Raza rose to a 3.9, and La Nueva 101.9 KSCA went 1.7–1.9–2.2. The counterexample is instructive — KLXO/KLXM, which swapped Spanish Classic Hits “Recuerdo” for Spanish CHR “Latino Mix” mid-month, dropped to a 0.8. Format flips take a book or three to show their real shape.
The Creative Arts Emmys clear the decks at the Peacock Theater
The 2026 Creative Arts Emmy Awards were handed out over two nights, Saturday and Sunday, at the Peacock Theater downtown — the annual weekend when the Television Academy moves through the craft and nonfiction categories before the main show gets the room. TVLine’s running list has the results: “The Pitt,” which led the field with 25 nominations, took guest actor and prosthetic makeup among others; “Hacks,” whose 24 nominations set a single-year record for a comedy, won picture editing for its finale; and Apple TV’s “Pluribus,” at 18 nods, collected production design and main title theme.
For anyone in town who works the awards beat rather than watches it, the calendar is the story: a pre-taped broadcast combining both Creative Arts nights airs Saturday on FXX, and the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards follow Monday, September 14, on NBC and Peacock with Mariska Hargitay hosting. That is three Emmy telecasts inside ten days, all originating from the same three blocks of downtown Los Angeles.
Telemundo 52 hires an ABC7 producer to run its shop
Carolina Murillo started Tuesday as executive producer at Telemundo 52 Los Angeles (KVEA), Veronica Villafañe reported at Media Moves. She arrives from three years at ABC7, where she led daily production of the 6 p.m. newscast across broadcast and streaming; her credits there include the station’s coverage of the 2025 Southern California wildfires, which won ABC7 a Peabody.
It is a small move with a familiar shape. The English- and Spanish-language sides of the LA market have been trading senior producers back and forth for years, and the traffic increasingly runs both directions — a decade ago the assumption was that talent flowed from Spanish-language stations to the general-market ones. Murillo has now worked at Univision, Telemundo’s network morning show in Miami, ABC7 here, and Telemundo 52. Given the ratings above, the Spanish-language newsrooms in this market are not the ones playing defense.
That’s the week
Two beats were genuinely quiet and we would rather say so than pad: no in-window news out of the Los Angeles Times or the Guild, and nothing new on the LA Press Club’s press-freedom docket after this spring’s Ninth Circuit ruling. Watch for the AB 2222 endgame — the Governor has until the end of September to sign or veto the local-journalism tax credit that cleared the Legislature last month — and, closer to home, whether KFI’s slide is a blip or a trend when the September book lands in October. Know something we should? Tips are always welcome.