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KSBR-FM at Saddleback College to go silent after 50 years

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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.”

https://www.ocregister.com/2026/02/23/ksbr-fm-at-saddleback-college-to-go-
silent-after-50-years/

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KSBR-FM at Saddleback College to go silent after 50 years J D <j_d@invalid.org> - 2026-02-26 21:33 +0000
  Re: KSBR-FM at Saddleback College to go silent after 50 years Kevin Alfred Strom <kevin.strom@revilo-oliver.com> - 2026-03-23 15:21 -0400

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