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Employee Number One
Galán, a Cuban immigrant who arrived in New Jersey as a child, landed a reporter job at a CBS station in Boston. Two business moguls she interviewed asked where she wanted to go, then told her they had just bought a TV station in Newark, New Jersey, and needed one person to get it started. The area was one where she would need a bodyguard to get through the door.
One of the moguls pointed out that the first employee at a company that might grow into a billion-dollar business would do far better than a cookie-cutter reporter. She took the job. A few years later the station was making $8 million a year, and she was getting the chance to build a small building in another town. Then a lawyer walked in and told her the company had been sold, with a car and a little money coming her way.
Sold Without a Word
She drove to the owner's Park Avenue office in New York, weeping, and asked how he could sell her baby without a word. He looked at her and said those were his chips, and if she was so smart, she could go get her own. A couple of days later she realized he had never said she did a bad job or offered to find her another one. Maybe he thought she was good enough to get her own chips.
Getting Her Own Chips
She started another company and became the first American female president of Telemundo. The man who sent her off stayed her mentor for the rest of her life, and she later called that moment the most important of it.
How did Telemundo get started?
Telemundo began in Puerto Rico in 1954 as a television station in San Juan. It grew into a Spanish-language network in the United States, serving viewers in large Hispanic markets. NBC bought the network in 2002 and folded it into its television group.
How do local TV stations make money?
Broadcast stations earn most of their revenue by selling advertising time around their programs. Prices follow how many viewers a station reaches, so ratings set the rates. Since the 1990s, many stations have also earned fees from cable and satellite providers for carrying their signals.
Why did many Cubans settle in New Jersey?
After Fidel Castro took power in 1959, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the island. Many settled in Florida, and a large number went to the New York area, especially Hudson County in New Jersey. Union City and West New York became so heavily Cuban that the area was nicknamed Havana on the Hudson.
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