The KVVN call letters were first heard on the air on October 17, 1997 when new owner Inner City Broadcasting Corporation jettisoned the station’s longstanding Spanish-language programming in favor of broadcasts targeted at another major Bay Area ethnic community: Vietnamese-Americans.
Inner City was a story in its own right; a highly-visible Black-owned media company that had acquired stations in numerous major markets. Its Bay Area portfolio included Berkeley stations KBLX and KVTO (the former KRE).
K VVN adopted the slogan “San Jose’s New Asian Voice”. By 2002, BIA Financial Network estimated the station’s annual revenue at $800,000–a sliver of the $30 million or more being raked in by the top San Francisco stations of that era.
A complicated series of financial transactions would alter KVVN’s future. In 2011-2012, Inner City Broadcasting was forced into bankruptcy by its debt holders. Control of its assets, including the three Bay Area radio stations, fell into the hands of YMF Media, despite opposition from the Internal Revenue Service and the broadcast performers union AFTRA.
YMF Media was controlled by billionaire investor Ron Burkle. NBA great turned entrepreneur Earvin “Magic” Johnson Jr. was a significant investor.
As it turned out, Magic and company made a fast break from the radio business, selling off Inner City’s portfolio over the next two years.
KVVN was acquired by San Franciscan Phuong Pham’s Pham Radio Communication LLC, which spent $6 million dollars to buy KVVN and KVTO in 2013.
KVVN soon adopted a new slogan: “The Voice of Vietnam”. The station pointed with pride to its local ethnic ownership, calling itself “The only Vietnamese radio station in America owned and operated by a Vietnamese-American” and “The only Vietnamese radio station in the Bay Area owned by a local resident.”
While co-owned KVTO focused on Chinese-speakers, KVVN kept its focus on the South Bay’s large Vietnamese population. San Jose’s Little Saigon neighborhood was the vibrant center of a community that had grown to an estimated 135,000 people by 2020.
Pham Communication acquired what was left of a legacy San Jose station, KLIV, in 2020. Pham paid Bob Kieve’s Empire Broadcasting $100,000 to rescue a station that had gone dark. Pham would begin simulcasting KVVN’s content on KLIV, which had a better signal coverage area than KVVN.
In the early 2020s, KVVN often operated at reduced power, notifying the Federal Communications Commission in a series of letters that repeated vandalism at its San Jose transmitter site had led to problems. Apparently, people were hijacking electricity from the station’s antenna tuning unit shed. At one point, the station said it had installed two new security cameras, only to have one of them stolen within 24 hours.
KVVN became the Bay Area outlet for Saigon Radio, a Southern California-based service that provided weekday programming to station in three markets with sizable Vietnamese-speaking populations: San Jose, Los Angeles/Orange County, and Houston.
