Switch to All-Country at KCSN Sparks Debate

Sometime within the next few weeks, an engineer will throw a switch at KCSN-FM (88.5) in Northridge, settling half of a dispute that has racked the station for more than a year.

The switch will activate a new, $58,000 transmitter that station managers say will double KSCN’s potential listening audience by beaming its signal into the Santa Clarita Valley. However, the station’s former engineer and the chairperson of its community advisory board predict that reception of the signal will suffer markedly, making the increase in range a hollow accomplishment.

The second half of the controversy will take longer to resolve.

On June 26, in an effort to find a niche in the crowded, competitive field of Los Angeles radio, KCSN dropped so-called eclectic programming and went to a single-music format of “traditional country.” Station management expects Santa Clarita Valley listeners to love the music, which includes such roots-of-country styles as bluegrass, folk, Cajun and a Louisiana backwoods offshoot called zydeco.

But the many critics of the shift in programming contend that KCSN not only has sold out, but is doomed to fail as well. The Santa Clarita Valley will listen to ZZ Top or “Thus Spake Zarathustra” before it will tune in zydeco, they say.

Operates on Campus

KCSN is a public radio station that broadcasts from the Speech-Drama Building at California State University, Northridge. Despite the change in its music programming, the station continues to air the National Public Radio programs “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” It also devotes Sundays to ethnic shows and other public-affairs programs.

Of KSCN’s $474,000 annual budget, 44% comes from university funds, 32% from the federal Corp. for Public Broadcasting and 24% from fund raising in the community. The station employs six people full-time and six part-time.

Michael Turner, 38, of Chatsworth, has been program director for seven years. He emphasized that KCSN is not a college station.

“A college station would be run by students with faculty advisers,” he said. “We’re run by a professional staff. The FCC license is granted to the California State University Board of Trustees. When the station went on the air 24 years ago, it was a college station. But it grew from that. We’re supposed to serve the needs of the community, which includes the college but isn’t limited to the college.”

The point is important, because when Turner and station manager Jack Brown dropped 60 hours a week of rock and classical music, they alienated CSUN radio students who earn class credit working at the station. Many of the students prefer rock or classical to traditional country, and they saw more opportunity to develop their own programs in an eclectic format.

Also axed in the programming change were shows staffed by about 26 volunteers, or members of the community who are not CSUN students.

A harsh critic of both changes at KCSN--the all-country format and the new transmitter--is Karen Kearns, who teaches classes in radio at CSUN and is chairwoman of the KCSN community advisory board. Kearns was a staff member of National Public Radio in Washington from 1980 to 1985, announcing on “All Things Considered” and working in NPR’s education department.

“If country is such a great format, how come there are only two stations doing it?” she asked. (Commercial stations KLAC and KZLA broadcast country music.)

‘No Research’

“My feeling is that this was done on the basis of no research at all. It really bothers me when this is a major music school. We have three jazz bands and a major orchestra. We do two operas a year. We have a chamber series. But the radio station is doing hardly anything with it.”

KSCN’s new format includes “Music Made in America,” a one-hour show on Sunday evenings featuring interviews and excerpts of music from CSUN faculty and students. Turner said the station also will air three or four complete musical performances each school year, a commitment that Kearns termed inadequate.

Larry Bloomfield heads Canyon Broadcasters, a firm that is starting an AM station in the Santa Clarita Valley. Bloomfield’s group has cleared many of the bureaucratic hurdles necessary to begin a station but is awaiting Federal Communications Administration action that includes the assigning of call letters. The Canyon Country man hopes to be on-air within a year. He said his research suggests that KCSN management may be disappointed with its new programming.

“We did a survey of 500 people in the Santa Clarita Valley, and the most popular formats were adult contemporary--meaning top 40 and mellow rock--and classical, with country a distant third,” Bloomfield said. “I don’t think the audience is real big for country out here.”

KCSN’s Turner said he and other station staff members based the format change on demographic studies of the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, on conversations with Santa Clarita Valley leaders and on the fact that country music placed third in popularity, behind rock ‘n’ roll and news-talk formats, in the most recent Arbitron survey.

Turner’s decision has the support of Lennin Glass, dean of the School of Communications and Professional Studies, who has authority over radio station operations at KCSN. “All the research, all the studies, tell us that we have to go to a single format,” Glass said.

Turner also expects fund raising to benefit from a one-format approach.

“We have to ask our listeners for money, and we’ve found in the past that our return from rock shows is only 17% of what was pledged,” he said. “In country, the return was 82%. The classical return was 60%.

“We had competent professionals in the radio industry look at our operation, and they told us to establish an identity with a single format,” Turner continued. “It’s a CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) requirement that you can’t duplicate the format of another public-radio station. KUSC is doing all-classical and KLON in Long Beach is all-jazz. We’re all-country.”

Bob Hurley is director of engineering for CSUN’s radio, television and film department. His criticism of KCSN management concerns the change of transmitter. Hurley said he turned over engineering duties at KCSN to an assistant a year and a half ago, preferring to be elsewhere when the new equipment switches on.

Other Options

“I moved out of the radio station because I didn’t agree with the new-transmitter idea,” Hurley said. “There should have been other options looked at, because, once you switch over, you’re dead meat.”

The transmitter KCSN uses now broadcasts 3,000 watts from the rooftop of the university’s Speech-Drama Building. The new transmitter, atop an antenna tower on Canyon Peak Loop above Sylmar, will broadcast only 52 watts. FCC rules require the reduction to prevent interference with other stations that could result from an elevated transmitter.

Whereas AM radio waves are several hundred feet long and can move around such obstacles as hills and buildings, FM waves are just a few feet long and easily can be blocked. Engineers use the term line of sight to describe FM transmission, comparing it to the beam of a flashlight. Thus the altitude of an FM transmitter is more important than its power in reaching listeners.

Broadcast engineers use the concept of a service area’s “average terrain” in measuring altitude. The Canyon Peak transmitter is 2,000 feet above average terrain, contrasted with 230 feet below average terrain for the present transmitter. The huge altitude gain makes Turner’s eyes light up.

“From the new antenna site you can see the towers of Century City,” he said. “Not only will we go into the Santa Clarita Valley, we think we’ll go over the Santa Monica Mountains.”

Hurley, however, believes the station is giving up too much power.

“When you’re at 52 watts, there’s a lot of hash you can’t cut through,” he said. “A building with thick walls is really going to cut down the signal. It’s very probable that areas of Sylmar and San Fernando that we cover like a blanket will be history, because they’re in the shadow of the transmitter.”

Radio instructor Kearns sides with Hurley.

“You can’t even read with a 52-watt bulb,” she said. “Yes, the altitude is important. But, in a congested market like Los Angeles radio, with lots of signals, they’re going to lose sharpness. It’s going to affect people listening in cars. There’s a chance we’ll get a shadow area along Woodland Hills, Tarzana and Encino.” A shadow area is a place where hills cause poor reception.

The experience of commercial station KUTE-FM suggests that Hurley and Kearns may be right. Engineer Clark Ortol said the loss of an antenna site forced the station to move its transmitter to Mt. Wilson and to reduce power from 8,200 to 650 watts. The result, he said, was interference from the signals of stations that adjoin KUTE on the FM band.

Program director Turner acknowledged that, with the new transmitter, KCSN’s reception may suffer in Sylmar and San Fernando, but he disputed the rest of the criticism.

Firm Was Recommended

“We paid an independent consulting engineer--Communications General Corp. of Encinitas--to do a study considering all the possibilities,” Turner said. “Commercial stations with a lot more at stake have followed what this company says. We did not take out a map and throw a dart. In fact, the FCC recommended this company to us.”

Turner said that Hurley and Kearns are ill-informed when they say that KCSN could have copied KUSC and Santa Monica’s KCRW and widened its service area with repeater stations--FM installations that leapfrog a signal to more distant spots.

“We looked at that alternative, but because of short spacing--which is protecting the signal of adjoining stations--we were restricted in where we could go with repeaters,” he said. “It wasn’t practical.”

The $58,600 cost of the new transmission included engineering studies, the transmitter itself and the leasing of space on the hilltop antenna. Funds came from a $38,000 federal grant, with lesser amounts donated by the Ahmanson Foundation, the university and the community.

University money also will be used, beginning in September, to pay disk jockeys $5 an hour for their work. Students and community members may try out for the jobs. But, despite the chance to make money, many of those associated with KCSN are unhappy.

“What management is doing with the station isn’t my idea of what public radio is about,” said Dan Hirschi, 27, of Chatsworth, a senior in the radio, television and film department. “I don’t want to say too much because I’m trying out for one of the on-air country jobs. But public radio is about variety.”

Stephanie Fecht, 19, a student from Arleta, said KCSN has sacrificed “unusual music that wasn’t found on other stations.” She complained that “all-country is too much of a commercial approach.”

Community volunteer James Austin had done a weekly show called “Bop Street” for nine years, playing rhythm and blues, doo wop, boogie-woogie and rockabilly.

“What they want is homogenized radio,” said Austin, of Agoura. “I have to give them credit for their traditional country. It sounds great. But I don’t go with the idea that, if a little of something is good, then a lot of it is better.”

Austin, who works in the artists and repertoire department of Rhino Records, said he did the unpaid show out of love for the music he played. KCSN has eliminated “a lot of on-air knowledge and expertise,” he said.

Glen Gordon agrees. Gordon’s weekly show, “Play It Again, Glen,” ran for 10 years.

“It was 1950s and ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll put together thematically,” said Gordon, 28, of Tarzana. “I was playing the stuff that made the charts but didn’t make the top of the charts. People heard it when it came out and probably haven’t heard it again. And now maybe they never will, because you can’t turn the dial and get it somewhere else.”

Turner, for one, is tired of the controversy. For him, all-country programming will have one major benefit even if it eventually fails.

“It’s easier for me as a program director to manage a single format,” he said with sigh. “It’s like having three kids instead of 10 kids.”