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| Global Aviator Amelia Earhart At A KGO Mic |
KGO, last of the old-time news talk call-in radio stations in San Francisco, announced a format change Thursday, after 80 years at 810 on the AM dial.
In a sign of the times and the end of terrestrial talk radio, the announcement was issued on Twitter:
— KGO 810 (@KGO810) October 6, 2022
The shake-up happened around 10 a.m. while the station was airing “The Mark Thompson Show.” In the middle of the program, the audio feed suddenly switched to a pre-taped announcement about the format change, reports The Desk.
On Monday, KGO Radio will re-launch with a new format focused on sports talk and related programming, a person familiar with the change told The Desk. The shows will incorporate aspects of sports betting as a central theme; some syndicated sports analysis shows are also expected to be on the schedule, the source said.
Here's how the abrupt change sounded...
KGO Abruptly Signs-Off - https://t.co/fBtytYjN0p pic.twitter.com/otuMc5BeNx
— FormatChange.com (@FormatChange) October 6, 2022
Shows that are slated to air on KGO Radio under the new format include “Bet MGM Tonight” and “Bet QL Daily,” the source said, and the name of the station will change to “The Spread 810AM.” Other syndicated and locally-produced programming will be announced over time.
KGO Radio will become the second sports betting radio station owned by Cumulus Media. Last month, the company relaunched WPRV 790 AM in Providence, Rhode Island with a sports betting format.
It was not clear if the format change will result in job losses at the station. Two people who work at KGO Radio told The Desk they were unaware of the planned format change until they heard about it on the air. Officials at KGO Radio and Cumulus were unavailable for comment.
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| Ronn Owens |
The change to a sports-betting format comes as Californians are set to vote on two initiatives that could make mobile sports betting legal in the state for the first time. Sports betting companies like Fanduel, MGM Resorts and others have spent millions of dollars in advertisements across local television and radio stations urging voters to pass the initiatives, while most Native American tribes in the state have opposed them.
Iconic morning host Ronn Owens left the station about a year ago, after more than four decades hosting a talk show, mostly in the morning-drive time slot. “KGO is gone. It’s history, turn off the lights,” said Owens by phone from Arizona where he is living in retirement.
“We were the No. 1 station out of 80 stations in the market for 31 years, which is amazing. They tried to make KGO all news on the cheap and it was terrible,” he said.
At its peak in the 1980s and 1990s, what was discussed on KGO’s airwaves set the Bay Area’s daily agenda.
“Every single bit of it was live and local,” said Mickey Luckoff, the retired former president and general manager. KGO claimed to have invented the term “Newstalk,” which it tried to trademark.
“We were the original and the best station that combined news blocks with polished personality talk shows,” he told The S-F Chronicle.
The history...
In 1924...After several late-night test broadcasts, using the experimental call letter 6XG, radio station KGO signed on the air from General Electric's Oakland, electrical facility (the original two-story brick building, constructed specifically for the station on East 14th Street, still exists on the site), as part of a planned three-station network comprising WGY in Schenectady, New York, and KOA in Denver, Colorado.
The General Electric Company had been one of the giants of the electrical industry since its founding by Thomas A. Edison in the nineteenth century. After conquering the worlds of power generation and electric lighting, the company became one of the pioneers in the radio field as a partner with Westinghouse in the new RCA manufacturing conglomerate. As a major early manufacturer of radio receivers, they, like Westinghouse, saw the value in operating broadcast stations to promote the sale of radio receivers. General Electric constructed and operated WGY at its manufacturing facility in Schenectady, New York in 1922.
With the success of WGY, General Electric began making plans to build two other high-powered radio stations. One station was to cover the mountain and plains states, while the third was to be heard on the Pacific Coast. They immediately began investigating the San Francisco area as a base for the Pacific station, because of its location midway along the coast, and because of the ample supply of musical talent in the area. Originally, General Electric announced plans to build the station on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, and had drawn up plans for several ornamental antenna structures to be built there. However, they finally settled on a site in Oakland, at a G. E. power transformer manufacturing facility there, located at East 14th Street and 55th Avenue. At the time, what is now known as East Oakland was only sparsely populated, and G. E. had just completed their sprawling plant on a 24-acre site earlier that year.
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| Early KGO Transmitting Room - date unknown |
Construction was begun on the studio and transmitter buildings in June of 1923, about a year before the company's third station, KOA in Denver, was begun. The license was applied for and the call letters KGO assigned. Those call letters had previously been held by a radio store in Altadena, near Los Angeles. That station had gone off the air after less than a year of operation.
Meanwhile, newspapers in the area were heralding the coming of a great new super-station to the Bay Area. The "Examiner" headlined, "Plans Ready for Biggest Radio in the West". It announced that the new thousand-watt station would be strong enough to "throw the human voice one third around the world ... more powerful than any station west of Schenectady, New York," referring to G. E.'s eastern operation.
KGO was first known as the "Sunset Station"; at that time it operated with a then-impressive 1000 watts. As was the custom with early radio stations, the programming consisted of performances by local talent, including the KGO Orchestra which provided some of the music; and a dramatic group known as the KGO Players, which performed weekly plays and short skits, often under the direction of Bay-area drama instructor Wilda Wilson Church. The station's music, which was also performed by other local orchestras and vocalists, would include classical selections as well as popular dance music the next night. Due to GE's involvement in RCA and RCA's launch of the NBC radio network, KGO was soon operated by NBC management as part of the NBC network.
By the 1928 Band Plan, 790 kHz was allocated to Oakland, California, and to KGO, which was then owned by General Electric, on an internationally cleared basis. In order to obtain a clear channel in Schenectady, New York, for what would become the present-day WGY, GE effected a breakdown of 790 kHz, whereby WGY would assume the maximum permissible power, and KGO would be lowered in power to 7.5 kW, which was then lower than the minimum permissible power for a clear channel station (10 kW), but higher than the then maximum permissible power for a regional channel station (5 kW). Both stations retained omnidirectional antennas. Therefore, GE effectively removed from the West one of its eight clear channels and added an additional clear channel to the East thereby giving the East nine clear channels and the West only seven. The other "regions" in the Band Plan all retained their allotted eight clear channels.
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| KGO 810 AM Coverage (50 kw, DA2) |
In 1941, stations on 790 kHz were moved to 810 kHz. On December 1, 1947, KGO was directionalized, and power was increased to 50 kW, the new minimum (and maximum) power for a U.S. clear channel. An article in Broadcasting magazine noted that the increase "retired the nation's oldest regularly operating transmitter -- a 7,500-watter ... in use since Jan. 8, 1924."
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