KSL (radio) - History

History

KSL is Utah's oldest radio station and was originally designated with the call letters KZN. KSL/KZN began life as the radio arm of the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City newspaper also owned by the LDS Church. The station's first broadcast aired on May 6, 1922 in the form of a talk by then-LDS Church president Heber J. Grant. Earl J. Glade (later a four-term mayor of Salt Lake City) joined the station in 1925 and guided KSL's operations for the next fourteen years. Under Glade, John F. Fitzpatrick, publisher of the The Salt Lake Tribune (owned by the Kearns Corporation) acquired a quarter interest of KSL for a modest price. This was the Tribune's first business partnership with the LDS Church, though the Church later acquired full interest in the station.

In 1924, it changed its call letters to KFPT for one year and then adopted its current call letters in 1925 after they became available (until that time they had been used by a radio station in Alaska). A series of power boosts over the next decade brought the station to its current 50,000 watts (daytime broadcast power) in 1932. It spent time at several frequencies over the years before settling at 1160 kHz in 1941. Currently, KSL's AM signal can be heard across nearly all of Utah during the day, and in much of the western part of North America at night. Soon after becoming a clear-channel station, KSL joined the CBS Radio Network. It remained with CBS until 2005, when it switched to ABC News Radio. The station would also gain a television counterpart in 1949, the CBS affiliate KSL-TV (which switched to NBC in 1995 after KUTV became a CBS O&O, following its acquisition by Westinghouse)/

The station's owners made their initial foray into FM broadcasting in 1947 when they brought the original KSL-FM onto the then very sparsely populated FM dial at 100.3 Mc/s. The FM station format was beautiful music, a contrast to the then-current KSL format of news and commentary interspersed with adult contemporary music. The FM station was sold to a private owner in the mid-1970s due to FCC regulations on station ownership (which have since been greatly relaxed). The station, now the AC station KSFI, was bought back by Bonneville Communications in 2003, along with the classic rock station KSRP-FM and the (Hot AC station KQMB-FM. In the mid-1980s KSL adopted an all-talk format, completely dropping music programming, aside from its broadcasts of the Tabernacle Choir.

On September 3, 2005, KQMB-FM (102.7 MHz) was converted to become a simulcast of KSL, and changed its call sign to KSL-FM. The station's former branding, call signs, and format were later picked up by the unrelated station KCFM.