KLON-FM TO END NPR LINK

As of Sept. 30, National Public Radio will lose its second Southern California affiliate in less than a year.

KLON-FM (88.1) joins KUSC-FM (91.5), which quit NPR last year and began relying on news programming offered by rival American Public Radio. KLON will abandon its daily broadcast of NPR’s two premier programs, “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” but will not substitute APR programs.

Instead, KLON officials said the station will attempt to establish its own public radio news network.

“Since ‘All Things Considered’ and ‘Morning Edition’ are the only thing we do with NPR, we will drop our affiliation at the end of September,” said Dr. Gene Asher, executive assistant to the president of Cal State Long Beach State, which holds the license for KLON.

Asher said the action will save the jazz-and-information station about $195,000 in annual fees it must pay NPR to receive the network’s programming. NPR has nearly 300 affiliates nationwide.

“We’re not getting out of the news business,” Asher added. “We’ve been working on a plan for some time to move into a state and regional news system.”

In cooperation with KUSC, KLON hopes to establish its own West Coast news network for public stations, Asher said. In addition to offering regional and state news, the new network would seek stringers and correspondents from Pacific Rim countries including the Philippines, Japan and Korea. The new network, he said, would develop a daily newscast in the NPR news-magazine style and offer it to other public stations over KUSC’s satellite uplink transmitter.

Asher said the university sponsored a listener survey several months ago that indicated that most of the audience for NPR programs can receive them over the three remaining Los Angeles-area public stations--KCRW-FM (89.9) in Santa Monica, KCSN-FM (88.5), Northridge, and KPCC-FM (88.3) in Pasadena.