KNEW (AM)
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| City | Oakland, California |
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| Broadcast area | San Francisco Bay Area |
| Branding | Bloomberg 960 and 103.7 HD2 |
| Slogan | "Wall Street Listens. The World Listens." |
| Frequency | 960 kHz (also on HD Radio) |
| Repeater(s) | 103.7-2 KOSF-HD2 |
| First air date | 1925 (as KROW) |
| Format | Business Talk |
| Power | 5,000 watts |
| Class | B |
| Facility ID | 59957 |
| Transmitter coordinates | 37°49′40″N 122°18′53″W / 37.82778°N 122.31472°WCoordinates: 37°49′40″N 122°18′53″W / 37.82778°N 122.31472°W |
| Former callsigns | KFWM (1925-1930) KROW (1930-1959) KABL (1959-2004) KQKE (2004-2007) KKGN (2007-2012) |
| Affiliations |
Bloomberg Radio NBC News Radio |
| Owner |
iHeartMedia (AMFM Broadcasting Licenses, LLC) |
| Sister stations | KIOI, KISQ, KKSF, KMEL, KOSF, KYLD |
| Webcast | Listen Live |
| Website | bloombergradio.com |
KNEW (960 AM) is an American business talk radio station licensed to Oakland, California, which serves the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by iHeartMedia, Inc. The station's studios are located in SoMa district of San Francisco, and the transmitter is located in Oakland at the eastern end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
KNEW can also be heard in the HD format.
KABL began in Oakland as KFWM under the ownership of the Oakland Educational Society on July 8, 1925. The Oakland Post-Enquirer wanted a radio station to compete with the Oakland Tribune's KLX. This station became KROW , in June 1930, and used those call letters until 1959. It was a full-service station known for launching the career of comedian Phyllis Diller and for helping the career of "the world's greatest disc jockey" Don Sherwood, prior to his great career at KSFO.
In 1947, the station built a new transmitter on a 20-acre island leased from the Port of Oakland. The new transmitter was accompanied by an increase in power from 1 KW to 5 KW full-time.
This station is best known as the longtime home of KABL, the successor to KROW and one of the first beautiful music stations in the United States, owned by 1950s radio pioneer Gordon McLendon.
According to longtime McLendon national program director Don Keyes (d. 2006), in his book Gordon McLendon and Me, McLendon wanted to own a station in the San Francisco market, and 960 KROW seemed ideal because of its relatively low dial position and strong coverage of the San Francisco market. The original plan had been to launch a Top 40 format on KROW, but after McLendon and his team visited the market and discovered there were already several Top 40 stations, they decided there wasn't room for another one. As a result, they looked to KIXL, a beautiful-music station in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, market that was enjoying a fair amount of success despite being daytime-only, and decided to launch a similar format on KROW using KIXL's formula of quarter-hour blocks of familiar musical selections (three instrumentals, arranged by tempo, and one vocal) as a template. The new calls were to be KABL, as in San Francisco's legendary cable cars.
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Wikipedia