its media ownership rules to allow ownership of three stations in the largest markets. NBC would sell off KWHY in 2011 to the Meruelo Group as a condition of its merger with Comcast. In 2007, NBC announced that it would move its Los Angeles local operation to a site at Universal Studios Hollywood. The complex was completed in 2014, with separate studios for KNBC and KVEA and a shared newsroom. Despite being an integrated operation, unlike at KNBC, KVEA's anchors and reporters remained non-union until voting 18–1 to unionize with SAG-AFTRA in January 2023. News department Local news programming on channel 52 began with the KVEA relaunch, in the form of a 15-minute program called VEA Noticias. One of the station's early coups was its coverage of the 1986 San Salvador earthquake, which drew new news viewers and started competition with KMEX. This quickly expanded into a full news service, and the station produced 11 and a half hours of local news a week by 1987. To daily 6 and 11 pm news programs, KVEA added morning and midday newscasts when the news department expanded in January 2001, doubling its budget. In October 2001, a 5 am newscast also debuted. In 2002, KVEA notched its first win at 11 pm since November 1993. Eduardo Quezada, who had worked for KMEX for 28 years and had previously been described as a Los Angeles institution at channel 34, resigned from his position at that station and joined KVEA in 2003, citing the attention NBC was giving the news department and its then-airing of six hours a day of local news, doubling KMEX's output. By 2007, Quezada had resigned to become the vice president of news and public relations for Una Vez Más Holdings. In 2007, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa admitted that he had an extramarital affair with Mirthala Salinas, a KVEA reporter who at one time covered the political beat. The station suspended her for two months without pay for failing to disclose the conflict for interest and reassigned her to KVEA's bureau in Riverside. She failed to report to work there and left the company. Cuts led to the removal of the morning newscast before it was reinstated in 2011 alongside the launch of a new weekly public affairs program. Beginning in 2014, a series of local news expansions at Telemundo have added hours of news to KVEA's output. A