And Minnesota Public Radio does it quite well. They are going to have to cut in. How well Minnesota does here will largely depend on how much it is willing to spend. Under the deal now being hammered out, Southern California Public Radio, a Minnesota Public Radio subsidiary, would assume full control of the station by July 1, 2000. KPCC's Mantle said the market for radio news is there, but that the task of providing it has been largely left to the AM dial.
People do want local news.
I would disagree with anyone who would say you can't do local news in a compelling way. However, others have tried and failed. KLON in Long Beach led an effort in the late 1980s and early '90s to improve its local news content, but was shut out by listeners who thought it conflicted with its otherwise all-jazz format. Also at KCRW, an experiment that had Los Angeles Times staff writers report brief local stories over the Santa Monica station's airwaves has been on hiatus, perhaps permanently, for a month. Buzenberg said Minnesota will make of KPCC a one-stop station, without the need to skip from one station to another to get both national and regional news.