KPNI represents one of several attempts by Bay Area newspaper publishers to jump into FM broadcasting, only to beat a hasty retreat. The 770-watt Class A station was owned by Peninsula Newspapers, Inc., the publisher of the Palo Alto Times. In the burst of interest in broadcasting after World War II, Peninsula Newspapers applied for both an AM license and an FM license.
After receiving conditional approval for the FM station in December 1945 and a construction permit in July 1946, the company began what it called “interim” broadcasts in July 1947. At the time, there were no more than ten commercial FM stations on the air in the Bay Area and the number of FM radio sets that could receive their broadcasts numbered in the low thousands. General Electric, which sold receivers as well as transmitters, had taken to offering newspapers a tutorial on FM broadcasting. The San Francisco Chronicle carried a version of it under the headline “What Makes FM Broadcasting Better?”.
Not only was FM struggling to find enough of an audience to support a business, but the new new thing was television. KPIX would go on the air in December 1948 as the Bay Area’s first TV station after years of building excitement for the new medium that allowed audiences to see as well as hear a broadcast.
In August 1948, Peninsula Newspapers threw in the towel, asking the Federal Communications Commission to delete the construction permit for KPNI. The company told the FCC it “feels that it would be economically impractical to construct and operate an FM station without an AM station”. Peninsula Newspapers went on to note that it had been waiting for 20 months for a final decision on its AM license application after the hearing record in the case had been closed.
The story of KPNI is similar to that of Alameda’s KONG, another newspaper-owned FM station that lived a short life while ownership waited for a valuable AM license. Richmond’s KRCC was also owned by a local newspaper publisher and also shut down after a brief period on the air in the late 1940s.
