Heber J. Grant, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, speaks into a KZN microphone during the station’s first broadcast on Friday. KZN, which became KSL in 1924, turns 100 on Friday. (Utah State History)
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Editor’s note: This article is a part of a series reviewing Utah and US history for KSL.com’s Historic section.
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah’s news landscape, which dates back to 1850, shifted dramatically on May 6, 1922, as H. Carter Wilson read off a short message on a Saturday afternoon atop of the Deseret News headquarters in downtown Salt Lake City.
“Hello, hello, hello: This is KZN … Greetings! The Deseret News sends its greetings to all of you, far and wide,” Wilson said, according to the report from the Deseret News that day.
KZN launched that day with the goal to provide Utahns with news bulletins, music, weather reports and anything else of interest. The station’s first broadcast schedule was printed in the same edition of the newspaper.
Once Wilson welcomed in the first news radio audience, he began to read off the news of the day and a weather report before the station cut to a 15-minute musical program. He listed off baseball scores from the American, National and Pacific Coast leagues later in the evening before Heber J. Grant, then-president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, took over the microphone that evening for a dedication.
KDYL emerged days later, co-founded by Utah radio godfather Ira Kaar. There were nearly a dozen major news radio stations by the end of the decade, from Salt Lake City to Logan, Tim Larson and Robert Avery wrote in an article for Utah History Encyclopedia.
By the 1930s, only three remained.
Radio in Utah
KSL.com covered Kaar’s legacy in a previous history article. He was only 14 when he obtained a regular amateur radio license and 17 when he constructed the nation’s first educational radio station in 1919. He left Utah to help construct antennas and radiotelephone equipment at Coeur D’Alene National Forest in northern Idaho before returning to Utah to help the Salt Lake Telegram create KDYL.
News radio as it’s known today was born during that hiatus. While the federal government began issuing radio station licenses in 1912, KDKA in Pittsburgh started everything, launching a news station on Nov. 2, 1920. The Deseret News also dabbled in news radio for the first time that day, although informally. It broadcast bulletins through the form of a radio phone, per the May 6, 1922, edition of the newspaper.
The front page of the Deseret News on Saturday, May 6, 1922. The top headline announces the launch of KZN, which is now KSL NewsRadio. (Photo: Utah Digital Newspapers)
The radio trend started emerging elsewhere in the nation, prompting the federal government to issue regulations for call letters in 1921. This is where the “K” and “W” difference at the start of call letters was adopted: “K” for stations west of the Mississippi River and “W” for stations east, as noted by Early Radio History.
Interestingly enough, the Deseret News was originally hesitant about the idea of news radio, Yvette Ison wrote for History Blazer in 1995. That’s because the cost of traditional radio transmitters was “enormously high” at the time and newspaper managers were concerned that it could just be a “passing fad,” she wrote.
Ultimately, Wilson was tapped to build a radio transmitter atop the Deseret News headquarters in 1921 and the rest is history.
Broadcast news hit Utah by storm with KZN (rebranding to KSL in 1924) and KDYL (rebranding to KCPX) in May 1922. KDZL in Ogden and KDYV joined within a month of the first two stations, while KFCP in Ogden and KFLH in Salt Lake City joined in the next year. Then came KFUR and KFWA, both based in Ogden, before KFXD arrived in Logan. KFOO, KFUT and KFPH also joined the airwaves in Salt Lake City during the 1920s.
To be clear, there were dozens of newspapers in Utah that still dominated the news landscape as radio grew. And having ties to newspapers proved to be vital for those first radio stations in the state.
Strength in numbers
Only three of the original 11 stations made it past the 1920s: KSL, KDYL and KFUR (now KLO). They survived simply because they had connections with the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Telegram, and Ogden’s Standard-Examiner, respectively, Larson and Avery noted.
“Initially, the newspaper owners saw the fledgling stations as little more than devices to promote subscriptions through crystal-set giveaways, but the evolution of broadcasting as a viable financial enterprise of its own led to a genuine symbiotic relationship,” they wrote.
Their survival ultimately led to the creation of more radio stations across the state, which followed the formula for success.
It also helped that the original broadcast engineers also went across the state to help create new broadcast stations. Kaar, for instance, helped create KFUT at the University of Utah. John Baldwin, who first worked under Kaar at KDYL, ultimately helped create Utah’s first television broadcast station in 1946 with what’s now present-day KTVX (ABC 4 Utah), Larson and Avery wrote.
KSL joined the television broadcast ranks in 1949.
There are now over 100 radio stations across the state today, as well as about a dozen television broadcast stations. The growth of the state’s news media landscape dates back to Wilson’s short message a century ago.
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Carter Williams is an award-winning reporter who covers general news, outdoors, history and sports for KSL.com. He previously worked for the Deseret News. He is a Utah transplant by the way of Rochester, New York.
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