the movement within days of Salazar's death; even an anonymous journalist told Hunter S. Thompson in his 1971 Rolling Stone article "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan", "[W]ithin 24 hours after Ruben was murdered, [Danny] Villanueva started tearing up the news department. Now he's trying to ... cut the balls off the news and turn KMEX-TV back into a safe Tio Taco station." In its early years, KMEX-TV news was a small operation: in 1978, the station had two camera and reporter crews covering the Los Angeles area, and its newscasts primarily depended on material from United Press International and the local City News Service wire with less local news coverage than station management would have liked. The newsroom was in a converted house across the street from the studios. KMEX news became known for long-tenured personalities in the market and as a launching pad for correspondents with network careers. The Los Angeles Times described Eduardo Quezada, who anchored the news on channel 34 for 28 years, as an "institution"; he left for KVEA in 2003. María Elena Salinas worked for KMEX from 1981 to 1987 before becoming a national news anchor, a position in which she would remain for three decades. Jorge Ramos got his first job in American broadcasting at KMEX and was tapped to host a morning show; a network executive in town saw the show one day and invited Ramos to Miami to start a national morning show, which soon led to him hosting national news for the network. By 1990, KMEX began to beat the English-language news outlets in certain demographics in news ratings, first 18–34 and then 18–34, 18–49 and 25–54 by 1996. The latter accomplishment led to coverage from channel 34's English-language competitors. By 2005, what had been an achievement had become routine: a 2005 Univision press release trumpeted twelve straight years of ratings wins in the 18–34 and 18–49 segments for KMEX's 6 pm news. After a two-decade absence from morning news—having canceled a previous effort in the late 1970s to air network programming—KMEX returned to airing morning news with an hour-long program, Primera Edición, in January 1999. This was the first hour-long morning newscast produced by a Spanish-language TV station in the United States. After just a year, the program was expanded to two hours, and the Univision stations in Miami and New York had followed suit and started their own morning newscasts.