The Bay Area Radio
Schedule Archive

In the early days of radio, there were no schedules – broadcasts began when the station’s operator decided to turn on the transmitter. But soon, listeners wanted to know what was on, and when.

Several early stations were owned by newspapers – in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, the Oakland Tribune, the Hayward Daily Review, and the Berkeley Gazette all owned stations, so they began printing schedules for their stations, and then for the other stations, and then magazines such as San Francisco-based Broadcast Weekly popped up, providing extensive, infinitely-detailed columns of hour-by-hour schedules for local stations as well as those that could be picked from Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Chicago, and beyond.

With the advent of television, the daily radio schedules in local newspapers began to shrink, replaced by larger schedules devoted to TV shows, and magazines like Broadcast Weekly gave way to the mammoth TV Guide. Eventually, radio program info shrank down to a few scattered daily highlights in the daily paper… then nothing but a cursory listing of the local AM and FM stations by call letters, format and dial position (occasionally updated, but often very much out of date) in the Sunday entertainment section.

Here is our archive of Bay Area radio schedules through the years.