ATLANTA — New programs, new talent, new sets, a fancy new studio in Miami and a new logo featuring an outsize, stylized tilde. In an effort to broaden its appeal to Hispanic viewers in the United States, CNN en Espanol, the Spanish-language branch of the cable news giant based here, is undergoing a fundamental reconfiguration of both its content and image.

Gone is the repetitive traditional half-hour hard-news block that has been the Spanish network’s sustenance since it began broadcasting 14 years ago this week, replaced by informational, magazine-style shows meant to reinforce the new slogan “Live the news.” Three of those programs made their debuts last week: a business, investment and money-management show called “CNN Dinero”; a late-night wrap-up called “Conclusiones”; and a live, three-hour morning show called “Cafe CNN.”

“We started this network very much focused on Latin America, and that remains a priority market for us,” said Tony Maddox, executive vice president and managing director of CNN International. But it’s also “clear that the Hispanic population of the United States is growing, and growing at a rapid rate, and that it is a market underserved by the kind of news service we can provide.”

U.S. strategy

CNN en Espanol is available in 30 million homes “from Alaska to Patagonia,” as the network’s executives like to say. But fewer than 5 million of those households are in the United States, and the network’s new strategy, whose rollout began on Nov. 22 and will continue throughout the spring, is aimed at redressing that imbalance.

“This is probably the most significant makeover and push in the channel’s history, and there obviously has been a lot of strategic planning involved,” said Alan Albarran, director of the Center for Spanish Language Media at the University of North Texas, outside Dallas. “And it’s smart of them to approach it as a long-term project, because there’s no way this can happen overnight.”

CNN en Espanol has long operated bureaus in Mexico City and Buenos Aires and had correspondents in nearly every Latin American capital, as well as in global flashpoints like Jerusalem. Now the network is beefing up its Los Angeles and New York bureaus, and it recently opened the studio in Miami, which contributes three hours of live programming daily and provides experts and commentators for shows that originate from Atlanta.

“Part of what these bureaus have done is to inject more content from the United States, so that we have a much better balance than we did before,” said Eduardo Suarez, the network’s vice president for programming. “Miami is the capital of Latin America in the U.S., offering a vision of the Hispanic world you can’t get from Atlanta.”

Population boom

The makeover has coincided with the release of early data from the 2010 Census that shows that the Hispanic population of the United States grew by more than 40 percent over the past decade, to about 50 million people. The United States is now the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, with more Spanish speakers than Spain, and exceeded only by Mexico.

Projections suggest that the number is likely to more than double again by the middle of the century, when nearly one-third of the population is expected to be of Hispanic origin.

The format of many of CNN en Espanol’s new offerings will no doubt be familiar to viewers of English-language television. “CNN Investiga,” which is scheduled for 7 p.m. Sundays beginning next month, resembles CBS’s “60 Minutes,” while Carlos Montero, an affable Argentine who is making the transition from morning hard-news anchor to host of the “Today”-style “Cafe CNN,” said, “They are turning me into Matt Lauer.”