The 2000s brought increased national recognition of KMEX's work. In 2002, the Columbia Journalism Review graded the local newscasts in Los Angeles and gave KMEX the highest rating of any station in any language. A news feature, El 15% de los Estados Unidos, which reported about the impact of Latinos on the United States, won KMEX its second Peabody Award in 2005. In 2008, The Washington Post compared Southern California's English-language newscasts with KMEX's Spanish newscasts and concluded that "the sharpest coverage of state and local issues—government, politics, immigration, labor, economics, health care—is now found on Spanish-language TV", though it noted the criticism that KMEX's "advocacy journalism" style sometimes went a step too far on issues like immigration. News director Jorge Mettey, who led the KMEX-TV newsroom for five years, was fired in 2007 for allegedly breaching ethics policies; Mettey sued the next year and claimed that Univision executives had a hand in shaping news coverage with the goal of increasing advertising revenues. An increased investment by local news at Telemundo in the 2010s gave channel 34 a challenge. For the first time since 1987, KVEA beat out KMEX among viewers 18–49 in 2014. In June 2015, KMEX reformatted its morning newscast as A Primera Hora in order to target a younger audience. In April 2017, Univision launched Edición Digital California, a midday newscast aired on all of its stations in California. Sports programming In 2016, Univision announced a three-year deal to broadcast Spanish-language Los Angeles Rams programming, including preseason games and studio programs; this was the first time that Univision had ever entered into a media rights deal involving the National Football League. Programming aired on KMEX and KFTR and in the Bakersfield area on KABE-CD and KBTF-CD. In the last year of the agreement, only KFTR aired games. Notable former on-air staff Raul Peimbert – weeknight anchor (2005–2011) María Elena Salinas – news anchor and reporter (1981–1987) Jorge Ramos – reporter and host of Mundo Latino (1984–1987; currently anchor of Noticiero Univision) Technical information Subchannels KMEX broadcasts six subchannels of programming, including the main Univision feed. Analog-to-digital conversion KMEX-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 34, at 11:59 p.m. on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 35 to channel 34. Translator KMEX-DT is rebroadcast on the following