Over time, families get used to a few familiar faces on their TV screens, delivering the news each night, good and bad. They have their favorites and the channels and TV anchors they prefer, and trust is built over a span of years. At the end of a long career, a few lucky broadcasters will get to say that local families let them into their living rooms for decades.

San Antonians will have the opportunity to get to know a new face on the evening news, as KSAT12’s Ernie Zuniga just made the jump after veteran anchor Steve Spriester left the station in August. Zuniga, who anchored the morning news for FOX San Antonio for more than 17 years and joined KSAT in February, has more than three decades of experience in broadcast TV.

On Monday, October 20, Zuniga co-anchored his first 5, 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts alongside Stephania Jimenez, Myra Arthur and chief meteorologist Adam Caskey – and “thoroughly enjoyed it,” he told MySA. One of the biggest differences between the morning and evening seats, he said, is the length of the show. He said the evening newscasts “fly by” in comparison to the four or five-hour morning shows – and anchors still have to get all the news out there, uplifting stories of San Antonio and the usual crime and politics alike.

“Stephanie and I, in the 10 p.m. case … we have, I don’t know, 15 or 16 minutes to really get it all out there. And … probably, as we speak right now, the producers are working on crafting everything, and we’ve got such a great roster of reporters and just pros, you know, people who do their job so well and have a passion for it,” Zuniga said. “We have the serious news of the day, but I think we also have some great personalities. And KSAT has been great at allowing me to be me.”

But what’s more is the wake-up call. Zuniga said on Monday, he was able to hang out with his twins and pick up tacos for his wife before heading into work, something he wasn’t able to do on the morning shift.

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“For roughly 18 years, I got up at around 2:30 in the morning,” Zuniga said. “I’ve had people over the years say, ‘Well, how long did it take you to get used to that?’ And my answer is, never. I never got used to it.”

Even with all his experience in broadcast, Zuniga said being able to fill the spot left by Spriester, someone he “admired for so many years,” is “surreal.” The move to evening news and filling the place of a veteran broadcaster is something Zuniga said he never imagined in his “wildest, fantastical dreams.”

“This is something that I had, you know, wanted to do and had pursued in the past, and it just didn’t happen,” Zuniga said. “Maybe you think sometimes, well, maybe it’s not meant to be. And if I was going to, you know, ride out my career as a morning news anchor, that certainly would not have been a terrible thing by any means. But the evening news is something that I had not done yet and something that I had a passion … and everything fell into place, and so there’s probably a little divine intervention in there somewhere as well, but it just worked.”

This article originally published at San Antonio TV anchor lives out ‘wildest, fantastical dreams’ at KSAT.