The story
Minnesota Public Radio began on January 22, 1967, when KSJR-FM first signed on from the campus of Saint John's University in Collegeville, just outside St. Cloud. Colman Barry, then president of Saint John's, saw promise in the then relatively new technology of FM radio, and believed radio was an appropriate extension of Saint John's cultural and artistic functions to the broader community. He hired a 23-year-old graduate of St. John's, William H. Kling, as director of broadcasting.
The network began more or less out of necessity. Shortly after KSJR signed on, it became apparent that St. Cloud and surrounding Stearns County did not have enough listeners for the station to be viable. Kling more than tripled KSJR's power in hopes of reaching the Twin Cities, but that only provided grade B coverage to Minneapolis and the western portion of the metro, and completely missed St. Paul and the east. Realizing that the station needed to cover the Twin Cities to have a realistic chance of survival, St. John's started KSJN, a low-powered repeater station for the Twin Cities, in 1968. The operation was awash in debt, and by 1969, St. John's realized it did not have adequate financial or personnel resources to operate a full-fledged noncommercial radio station. With Barry's support, Saint John's transferred KSJR/KSJN's assets to a community corporation, St. John's University Broadcasting. This corporation later changed its name to Minnesota Educational Radio, and finally Minnesota Public Radio. Kling led MPR as president and CEO for 44 years before retiring in 2011.
MPR was a charter member of National Public Radio in 1971, and had helped lay the groundwork for forming that organization during 1969 and 1970. In 1971, operations moved from Collegeville to St. Paul, funded in part with a news programming "demonstration" grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. New studios were built and KSJN became the flagship station. In the 1970s, additional stations were added across Minnesota. During this period KSJN's news department won numerous regional and national awards and became one of the region's most highly regarded news operations.
In 1974, MPR began live broadcasting of Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, one of the best-known programs on public radio, from the Park Square Theatre in Saint Paul. In the program's early days, members of the production staff worked hard to fill the theatre seats, sometimes bringing in radio station staff and urging passersby to come into the theatre from the street. In 1980, MPR originated the Peabody Award-winning classical music show Saint Paul Sunday, which went national via syndication in 1981.
MPR assisted in 1983 with the formation of American Public Radio, later known as Public Radio International (PRI), which merged with Public Radio Exchange in 2019.
Originally, MPR played a mix of classical music and NPR news/talk programming. But as NPR expanded its offerings, Kling made plans to split MPR into separate classical and news/talk networks. To that end, MPR sought to buy a second FM frequency in the Twin Cities from the late 1970s onward. As a fallback, in 1980 it bought WLOL (AM 1330), one of Minnesota's oldest stations, and changed its calls to KSJN (AM), a simulcast of KSJN-FM. In 1989, AM 1330 changed its calls to KNOW and began airing an expanded lineup of NPR programming. In 1991, MPR bought WLOL-FM, AM 1330's former FM sister, allowing it to finally split its services into two networks. The KNOW call letters and intellectual unit, including the NPR news and talk format, moved to KSJN's old frequency of 91.1. The KSJN calls moved to WLOL-FM's former frequency of 99.5, which began playing classical music full-time.
MPR acquired Marketplace Productions, which produces Marketplace, "Marketplace Morning Report" and "Marketplace Money", from studios in Los Angeles, in association with the University of Southern California, in 2000. The same year, MPR founded Southern California Public Radio, which entered into a public service operating agreement with Pasadena City College to run KPCC in Pasadena, California. In 2004, MPR began distributing its own shows through American Public Media (APM), leaving PRI; APM was the third radio network in the U.S. to receive founding support from MPR, probably an unmatched record for an American radio station or network.
In 2004, MPR announced it would buy WCAL (89.3 FM), the classical music station operated by St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. WCAL (and a repeater station, KMSE in Rochester), were sold in a deal valued at $10.5 million, which the Federal Communications Commission approved in 2004. The next year, following the acquisition by MPR, WCAL changed its call letters to KCMP and was transformed into MPR's third service, "The Current".
Read the full text
In 2008, a WCAL advocacy group took St. Olaf College to court for breach of trust in selling the radio station. (A June 2008 judge's opinion described the station as a charitable trust and therefore not the college's property to freely dispose of. [1] MPR's General Counsel and three attorneys took part in the proceedings.[2] In 2009 a court found in favor of MPR, ruling that the statute of limitations on the matter had expired, nullifying the advocacy group's standing.)
Today, MPR serves a regional audience of one million listeners through 43 stations presenting three broadcast network services.
Original materials from Minnesota Public Radio have been contributed to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
From Wikipedia’s article on Minnesota Public Radio, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5