A student-run low-power public radio station founded at Saddleback Community College, at one point Orange County’s first National Public Radio affiliate, will soon be off the air.
KSBR-FM at Saddleback College — most recently broadcasting as The SoCal Sound on 88.5 — has agreed to transfer its FCC license to Cal State Northridge’s KCSN-FM, the public radio station with which it merged in 2017 to defer costs and maximize signal strength.
The decision to go off air, which will happen when the FCC approves the license donation, was made in mid-December by the South Orange County Community College District and Elliott Stern, Saddleback College president, as a way to shed costs for programming that wasn’t going to make money and was no longer integral to the college’s curriculum, Stern said last week via email.
Some who were part of the station at the Mission Viejo college lament the loss of local programming in what they said is already a “news desert,” as well as the lost educational opportunity for the students.
KCSN operators say most listeners won’t notice a difference and the station’s programming is “perfect” for South Orange County.
When the stations began collaborating in 2017, radio experts called the merger “the most ambitious expansion of a broadcast operation in public radio’s history.” The two stations combined first to avoid interference, since they were both on 88.5, and to expand their signal footprint to a market that reached from Santa Clarita to San Clemente, helping it be more competitive. Initially, the two were to share programming, but in the end, KCSN’s format became the main source.
“The plan was if the two 88.5’s were playing the exact same thing, we would stop interfering with each other, and the signal footprint would expand so more people throughout L.A. and Orange County would be able to hear it more clearly,” said Patrick Osburn, general manager of Cal State Northridge’s KCSN. “That was wonderfully conceived, the engineering turned out to be harder than anticipated, and the revenue growth was over-anticipated as well.”
Even though KSBR will go silent when the FCC transfer is complete, the station’s vibe will live on, Osburn said.
In 2017, when the two stations simulcast, Osburn said Saddleback’s KSBR continued with its “jazzy feel” on a high-definition streaming station, 88.5-HD2, which is still active.
“We’re going to move some of the formats around, so that will stop streaming in its current form when its license transfer is complete,” he said. “But on the FM that everyone hears in their cars, no one will really recognize there’s a difference.”
Since the merger, Stern said the stations’ licenses continued to decline in value as streaming cut into radio listenership. An effort to sell the two radio broadcast licenses was made, he said, but the offer received was “far below the valuation” done a year before.
Cal State Northridge officials decided to keep the station and entered into negotiations to assume ownership of Saddleback’s license, Stern said, adding that an agreement was ultimately reached where Saddleback would “surplus its radio broadcast license to CSUN with payment for some of the debt accrued for station operations.”
Saddleback will pay $282,000 to CSUN.
Once the merger was completed, Stern added, KSBR had very little of the programming, but still had to pay personnel to maintain the school’s FCC license. The station has changed format multiple times while operating at a “high six-figure loss each year,” he said.
Osburn said there is a real incentive to continue broadcasting for South Orange County, where he said many of the station’s new listeners and donors live. He said the application for the transfer has been with the FCC office for about a month.
He prides himself on the station’s programming, he said, describing it as a unique rock format.
“We don’t obsess on the ratings as much as we focus on curating new and interesting music and still kind of honor the great classic rock artists all at the same time,” he said, which opens up a larger playlist for the station to pull from.
Osburn said much of the station’s music features upcoming local singer-songwriters, but recently, KCSN has also showcased Latin alternative music. On its HD 3 streaming channel, it’s devoted entirely to “bilingual sounds.”
And, he said, he’s not afraid to be controversial.
Recently, Osburn said, the station debated playing Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis.”
“We knew airing it would cause a stir and went ahead and did it, and it did cause a stir,” he said. “We’ve gotten a lot of emails and feedback about it. As it relates to controversial things in our society, our policy is ‘Let the music do the talking,’ and our DJs try to resist the temptation to editorialize beyond that because the artists say it better than we do.”
Radio has been hampered by new technologies that give listeners more ways to hear music, but while it may struggle, Osburn said, it will always have a place in people’s listening habits.
“The ones that stay alive are organizations like us that have adopted more of a multi-media approach,” he said. “We think of ourselves as a multimedia entity that is spearheaded by radio, but we have a lot of digital products, we have a robust website, we use data-based marketing, social media, video, and audio. We give our audience, and our member donors and sponsors, a real, robust multimedia experience.”
“We greatly appreciate Saddleback donating KSBR to us so we can continue playing the music and so everyone in Orange County and L.A. County can keep listening and won’t even know anything is happening,” he added.
But he also added that Cal State Northridge is taking on significant expense and risk to keep the station going, “because they believe in what we’re doing.”
“I don’t blame Saddleback one bit for divesting themselves out of the business, and I applaud them for having the collaborative foresight to donate it to us, so we can keep the music playing.”
The agreement to transfer the license ends the long-term partnership and closes the chapter on the traditional student-operated radio at Saddleback College. Critics worry less than a handful of public radio stations are left operating in Orange County.
For some of its alumnae, like Kelly Bennett, a former broadcast producer and reporter for KSBR who joined in 1996, the station was a community lifeline and one of Orange County’s most cherished local institutions.
“The skills I learned, from newswriting and anchoring to community outreach, DJ work, event production, and editorial responsibility, became the foundation for a 25-year career in journalism, broadcasting and public relations,” she said.
Among its highlights, Bennett points out the station’s signature KSBR Birthday Bash Jazz Festival. It also earned awards and additional honors for its talented DJs and volunteers, she said.
“It’s a sad day for Orange County,” said Billy Fried, who operates KXFM 104.7 FM in Laguna Beach. “It’s one more example of a thinning out of local media sources that’s an epidemic across the country for many reasons. How do you keep these things funded? Whether it’s foundation grants or members, everyone is going after the same dollars.”
Dawn Kambar, KSBR’s news director for 31 years, said she focused on the community. While she brought in news from the Associated Press, she also hosted local leaders to discuss topics important to South Orange County communities.
“It was a community station, students had the opportunity to be on the radio, there were a lot of good things happening,” she said.
Melodie Turori teaches three radio courses at Saddleback College and lets students earn extra credit by hosting live remotes on campus and play-by-play broadcasts of Saddleback athletics.
While she understands that Saddleback leadership has argued that the radio station isn’t a financial asset, she wonders how the administration assesses value.
“Should financial success be the only metric we’re using to determine the value of the station to students?” she said. “To the community? KSBR has a 50-year legacy in this community. Those years, the stories, the concerts, the listeners, the students, those all matter.”
“The station has been an important part of people’s lives and it could have been that again,” she added. “More importantly, because this is a public asset we’re talking about, (students and faculty) should have been notified that this process was taking place.”
Turori said she equates a public radio station to something like a public park.
“I would have liked to see the college explore exiting that contract and returning oversight of programming to the college,” she said. “It would have been a huge benefit to our students.”
Stern pointed out that the college doesn’t offer a radio program among its academic degree and credential programs, but that students can choose a radio focus when pursuing their associate degree.
“Students can enroll in an audio production class, and that class will continue to operate, as there is still demand for podcasts and other streaming content,” he said. “Audio content produced by students will play on a streaming station, but no longer on broadcast radio, with the transfer of the broadcast radio license.”
Gabriel Rossman, a sociology professor at UCLA who studies radio and film, said that the focus on local news has been gone for a while in radio, adding that in the 1970s — KSBR launched in 1975 — local news was more the purpose of radio.
The good news, he said, is that the barriers of entry (into radio) have never been lower. For 20 years, anyone has been able to distribute content, whether it’s a podcast or a Spotify playlist.
“The bad news is that it can be hard to find an audience amidst all the other people doing the same thing,” he added.
Terry Wedel, who was the station’s director of College Broadcast Services and staffed part of its NPR team, said in his mind, “the disappointment is that nobody really caught on to the big picture vision and really understood what having a radio station in a community really meant. And, what the possibility of having a radio station at a college could provide for the students, especially in partnership with a station in Los Angeles.”
“The greater tragedy,” he added, “is that there was an opportunity lost along the way, and when you give up the license, you give up the opportunity to work things out down the line.”
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