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KPCC Rebrands as LAist 89.3
- Thread starter coachguy6
- Start date
Turns out it's the Los Angeles version of the Gothamist, a publication owned by NY Public Radio (WNYC). They couldn't think of a better L.A.-specific term to use in the name, so they just cobbled together "LA-ist". There's also Chicagoist, DC-ist, and SF-ist (San Francisco):
en.wikipedia.org
Gothamist - Wikipedia
KPCC and HD-1 is generally mono. Stereo programming can be heard on their HD-2.
San Diego FM stations can be very strong in LA during summertime temperature inversions, and indeed, going in the other direction LA's KYSR 98.7 can sometimes be heard way up in the Central Valley. These stations are in the neighborhood of about 1100 ft above sea level, just perfect for inversion layer ducting. On the other hand, the Mt Wilson signals that can be usually be received in the San Diego area seem to drop 8-10 db during a strong inversion. At a mile high some of the signal seems to "bounce" right off the top of the inversion.
I absolutely agree. The name is positively idiotic, even more so considering the station is licensed to and located in Pasadena. In fact I think citizens groups in that area may even have a legitimate complaint to the FCC about whether KPCC is completely fulfilling its Community of License obligations.
Heck, way back in ancient times 1110 KRLA was issued a warning from the FCC to stop using the slogan: "This is KRLA serving Greater Los Angeles from Pasadena". They stopped using it, as the FCC reminded them that they are to only serve Pasadena. Even though they have a 50,000 Watt signal that covers all of LA and then some, the Friendly Candy Com folks told them that was "irrelevant".
When I lived in Riverside, KRLA only served us in the daytime!
I can see the FCC rolling their eyes if they got such a complaint. Especially based on branding.
You're probably right! ...but think of it this way: Here we have a radio station in an effort to be more "local" to listeners and potential listeners in LA, they're in effect moving themselves farther away from (in theory) where their core audience based on the COL is supposed to be. This all sounds ridiculous I realize, but what IS the point of a City of License? I suppose stations probably should be licensed only to a "Market"
You're making an assumption that LAist doesn't cover Pasadena news.
Pasadena is a city in LA County, so the LA in LAist could easily refer to LA County, not the city.
Remember, decades ago the FCC started using "Community of License" instead of "City of License". While some thought this was to include small towns, even those not incorporated. But it's interpretation has been "area of primary service". Back when we had to do extensive ascertainment with "community leaders" we were, by experience, expected to do that ascertainment in all the primary coverage areas, including other towns and cities in the coverage and market area.
So when I did ascertainment for a station in Miami, I talked with community leaders from Miami Beach, Sweetwater, Hialeah, Westchester, Doral, Coral Gable and other parts of the metro area. I did not just do the COL as that is not what our communications attorney told us was wanted.
Guess I didn't realize "Community" overarches "City". I simply thought they were interchangeable...
"Community" is vague, and that is what made us all do the ascertainment interviews all over the coverage area.
Can you help me understand this? KRLA's studio was in Pasadena. But, their transmitter and towers were in South El Monte. As we all know, their signal covered a huge area. So, what was the concern on the part of the FCC? Was the FCC upset that the transmitter was not in Pasadena? Was the FCC upset that that the signal extended beyond Pasadena? Did the FCC want the slogan to be, "Serving greater L.A. from South El Monte?" It seems that the FCC was continually upset with KRLA and threatening to pull the license. ( FCC always felt that KRLA was running phony contests).
If a station has a tower on Mt. Wilson, is the station obligated to say, "Serving Los Angeles from Mt. Wilson"? I'm not trying to be sarcastic, but I don't understand the FCC's beef with KRLA. Why did they assume the signal would not reach beyond Pasadena? KRLA was kind of what is called here.....a "blowtorch." Thank you for any information you can provide, from Daryl
The issue was that a legal ID has to be KXXX, Pasadena or, you can add owner or frequency only: KXXX, 1110 Pasadena or KXXX, My Broadcasting Company, Pasadena. But no puffery, and before, no other city.
It has to do with the former FCC rule on the "legal ID" which we had to do twice an hour way, way back and then once an hour from the earlier 70's onward.
There are some misunderstandings here that perhaps I can clear up, though it may get a little lengthy. Bear with me?
I wouldn't read as much as David does into "city" vs. "community" of license. Regardless of what his legal counsel in Miami said, it's my understaToday, there are not. nding (as a non-lawyer!) that the only reason that phrasing changed is because not every "community" to which a station is licensed is incorporated as a city, and in some cases not even incorporated at all. Under current regulations, the FCC will accept any "census-designated place" as a COL. Sometimes that's a military base, sometimes that's simply a locality that has a post office and a couple of businesses that use the community name. The standard is something called a "Tuck analysis," which looks at a list of qualifications that allow a location to be used as a COL. Some are very outdated now, for instance a question about whether there is a phone book issued for that location.
However - at no time has the substitution of "community" for "city" changed the principle that a station is licensed to a single community, not to a larger metropolitan area or media market. Every station that provides primary service (full-power radio or TV) is still licensed to a single community, whether it's an incorporated city, town, village, township or CDP.
What does that mean in 2023? A lot less than it meant in 1973. Back then, a station had to have its main studio within the corporate limits of its COL, unless the studio was at the transmitter site or a waiver was issued (rarely). Today, there is no main studio required at all. Back then, the FCC didn't allow you to mention other communities in your legal ID. Now, you can say whatever you want once you've said the calls and COL. ("KPCC Pasadena-New York-Atlanta" would be legal, if weird.) Back then, there were requirements for ascertainment and news and such. Today, those are pretty much all gone, save for the very generic quarterly "issues list" that has to be included in the public file.
What remains, then? A station must still do that legal ID hourly. It must cover its COL - again, an individual community, not a metro area or market - with the required signal level. That's 70 dBu for a commercial FM, 60 dBu over at least 50% of the COL for a noncommercial FM, 5 mV/m over at least 80% of the COL daytime for an AM. So a station licensed to "Pasadena" must have a usable signal in Pasadena. And that's really about it. Other than that, deregulation rules. The FCC doesn't want to be in the business of nitpicking programming content for 15,000 stations.
Having said all that, there's some additional regulatory gray area these days. A few years ago, the FCC implemented an "urbanized area policy" that begins to acknowledge the reality that if everything else is deregulated, it really doesn't matter whether KPCC is "Pasadena" or "Burbank" or "Los Angeles" because in reality, it serves the LA metropolitan area. To oversummarize (and believe me, it's really more complex than this), the FCC now admits that in any area designated by the Census Bureau as an "urbanized area," there's no public interest benefit in claiming that you're providing a "first local service" to one particular locality in that larger urbanized area. So while you might once have been able to get an FCC preference by moving a station in to say, El Segundo (which has no station licensed to it), you no longer can - because El Segundo is part of the Los Angeles urbanized area and is already very well served by all the stations in that urbanized area.
If you're making a technical modification to a station in an urbanized area, you can now do so without having to worry that you're "removing first service" as long as the station remains in an urbanized area - so if KPCC were to find a way to get a power upgrade, it could in theory relicense itself as "Los Angeles" or some other community in the urbanized area, so long as its signal covers that other community properly. (The FCC won't let you just file to change COL without other changes in this case, because everyone would do that and they don't want the headache of processing all that paperwork.)
(Sidebar: the real intention of the urbanized area policy was to stop stations from being "moved in" to urbanized areas from distant rural communities. But by the time the policy was adopted, it was really too late - all those FMs that were dragged from Oklahoma into the north Dallas exurbs, for instance, had already moved under the old rules.)
To summarize, at least in these cases:
In 2023, it mostly doesn't matter that KPCC's license says "Pasadena." There's no requirement that the studio be there (or anywhere), or that any programming be specific to Pasadena. As long as the 89.3 signal covers Pasadena and the station says "Pasadena" in its legal ID, the FCC doesn't care whether it calls itself "LAist," "The Aardvark" or "Phil" the rest of the hour. The response to any complaint will be "we don't regulate programming content."
Back in the day, it did matter that KRLA's license said "Pasadena." Its transmitter could be in South El Monte as long as its signal put the required signal level over Pasadena (back then, it was 25 mV/m daytime over the central business district). It could not put "Greater Los Angeles" in its legal ID, especially before "Pasadena." The FCC couldn't stop it from appealing to listeners outside of Pasadena, but it did require KRLA to maintain the legal fiction in its IDs that it was specifically a Pasadena station (and really, how silly was that, even then?)
"Community" still has a specific meaning, and it's not synonymous with "metro area" or "market." At some point, perhaps the FCC might be persuaded to license stations to a market instead of a specific community, but for now it still maintains a distinction, at least on paper, between "Los Angeles" and "Pasadena" or "Glendale" or "Santa Monica," even if it makes no real-world difference anymore.
Does that at least start to make sense?
I wouldn't read as much as David does into "city" vs. "community" of license. Regardless of what his legal counsel in Miami said, it's my understaToday, there are not. nding (as a non-lawyer!) that the only reason that phrasing changed is because not every "community" to which a station is licensed is incorporated as a city, and in some cases not even incorporated at all. Under current regulations, the FCC will accept any "census-designated place" as a COL. Sometimes that's a military base, sometimes that's simply a locality that has a post office and a couple of businesses that use the community name. The standard is something called a "Tuck analysis," which looks at a list of qualifications that allow a location to be used as a COL. Some are very outdated now, for instance a question about whether there is a phone book issued for that location.
However - at no time has the substitution of "community" for "city" changed the principle that a station is licensed to a single community, not to a larger metropolitan area or media market. Every station that provides primary service (full-power radio or TV) is still licensed to a single community, whether it's an incorporated city, town, village, township or CDP.
What does that mean in 2023? A lot less than it meant in 1973. Back then, a station had to have its main studio within the corporate limits of its COL, unless the studio was at the transmitter site or a waiver was issued (rarely). Today, there is no main studio required at all. Back then, the FCC didn't allow you to mention other communities in your legal ID. Now, you can say whatever you want once you've said the calls and COL. ("KPCC Pasadena-New York-Atlanta" would be legal, if weird.) Back then, there were requirements for ascertainment and news and such. Today, those are pretty much all gone, save for the very generic quarterly "issues list" that has to be included in the public file.
What remains, then? A station must still do that legal ID hourly. It must cover its COL - again, an individual community, not a metro area or market - with the required signal level. That's 70 dBu for a commercial FM, 60 dBu over at least 50% of the COL for a noncommercial FM, 5 mV/m over at least 80% of the COL daytime for an AM. So a station licensed to "Pasadena" must have a usable signal in Pasadena. And that's really about it. Other than that, deregulation rules. The FCC doesn't want to be in the business of nitpicking programming content for 15,000 stations.
Having said all that, there's some additional regulatory gray area these days. A few years ago, the FCC implemented an "urbanized area policy" that begins to acknowledge the reality that if everything else is deregulated, it really doesn't matter whether KPCC is "Pasadena" or "Burbank" or "Los Angeles" because in reality, it serves the LA metropolitan area. To oversummarize (and believe me, it's really more complex than this), the FCC now admits that in any area designated by the Census Bureau as an "urbanized area," there's no public interest benefit in claiming that you're providing a "first local service" to one particular locality in that larger urbanized area. So while you might once have been able to get an FCC preference by moving a station in to say, El Segundo (which has no station licensed to it), you no longer can - because El Segundo is part of the Los Angeles urbanized area and is already very well served by all the stations in that urbanized area.
If you're making a technical modification to a station in an urbanized area, you can now do so without having to worry that you're "removing first service" as long as the station remains in an urbanized area - so if KPCC were to find a way to get a power upgrade, it could in theory relicense itself as "Los Angeles" or some other community in the urbanized area, so long as its signal covers that other community properly. (The FCC won't let you just file to change COL without other changes in this case, because everyone would do that and they don't want the headache of processing all that paperwork.)
(Sidebar: the real intention of the urbanized area policy was to stop stations from being "moved in" to urbanized areas from distant rural communities. But by the time the policy was adopted, it was really too late - all those FMs that were dragged from Oklahoma into the north Dallas exurbs, for instance, had already moved under the old rules.)
To summarize, at least in these cases:
In 2023, it mostly doesn't matter that KPCC's license says "Pasadena." There's no requirement that the studio be there (or anywhere), or that any programming be specific to Pasadena. As long as the 89.3 signal covers Pasadena and the station says "Pasadena" in its legal ID, the FCC doesn't care whether it calls itself "LAist," "The Aardvark" or "Phil" the rest of the hour. The response to any complaint will be "we don't regulate programming content."
Back in the day, it did matter that KRLA's license said "Pasadena." Its transmitter could be in South El Monte as long as its signal put the required signal level over Pasadena (back then, it was 25 mV/m daytime over the central business district). It could not put "Greater Los Angeles" in its legal ID, especially before "Pasadena." The FCC couldn't stop it from appealing to listeners outside of Pasadena, but it did require KRLA to maintain the legal fiction in its IDs that it was specifically a Pasadena station (and really, how silly was that, even then?)
"Community" still has a specific meaning, and it's not synonymous with "metro area" or "market." At some point, perhaps the FCC might be persuaded to license stations to a market instead of a specific community, but for now it still maintains a distinction, at least on paper, between "Los Angeles" and "Pasadena" or "Glendale" or "Santa Monica," even if it makes no real-world difference anymore.
Does that at least start to make sense?
KRLA was at 1410 So. Oak Knoll in the Huntington Hotel.
I remember when 1580 KDAY applied to suffix their ID as KDAY Santa Monica-Los Angeles. They were rejected. But it was only a couple of years later that the commission changed the rules and said any station could add just about any city it wanted to after the COL if they reasonably served that city.
Just once, I want to hear Korva Coleman say "From Member station The Aardvark in Los Angeles, Joe Smith reports"
It's only marginally stupider than "From member station LAist, Joe Smith reports".
That must have been a long time ago. WKTU has been IDing itself as Lake Success-New York City for decades. Through multiple call letter changes.
I can't pin down the exact year the rules were relaxed, but I'm thinking early 1980s. If you go back to old WTFM airchecks, the legal IDs were just "Lake Success."
(Although in this unique case, you could probably make an argument that saying "WTFM Lake Success, New York" is identifying only the community of "Lake Success, NY.")
I bet that's right. A lotta rules were relaxed or repealed during the Fowler years.
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