BY ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES AND SAM SCHECHNER

Walt Disney Co. and Univision Communications Inc. are in talks to create a new 24-hour cable-news channel that will broadcast in English, in an effort to keep pace with changing demographics among U.S. Hispanics and reach a new audience of English speakers, people familiar with the negotiations said.

The new channel would plunge Disney's ABC News more directly into the fractious cable-news wars, competing alongside Time Warner Inc's CNN, News Corp.'s Fox News and Comcast Corp.'s MSNBC.

And it would mark a big strategic shift for Univision, which since its beginnings five decades ago has been defined by its Spanish-language ...