High Hopes for Radio: Newspaper-operated Radio Stations in Los Angeles and San Diego in the 1920s Linda Mathews Mathews ii Table of Contents Table of Figures ............................................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... iv Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... v Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1 Historiography .............................................................................................................................................. 4 Methodology ............................................................................................................................................... 13 Growth of Newspapers and Telegraphy ..................................................................................................... 13 Start of Broadcasting in Los Angeles and San Diego ................................................................................... 16 Connecting Households with “the Wider World” ....................................................................................... 18 Newspaper Broadcasting: Imagination Versus Reality ............................................................................... 26 Newspapers in the Entertainment Business ............................................................................................... 37 Where Are the Networks? .......................................................................................................................... 41 The Failure of Newspaper Associated Stations in Southern California ...................................................... 47 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 54 Primary Sources ...................................................................................................................................... 54 Magazines ........................................................................................................................................... 54 Federal Publications ............................................................................................................................ 56 Secondary Sources .................................................................................................................................. 58 Mathews iii Table of Figures Figure 1 Schematic of Los Angeles Times’s new radio station opening in October 1922. ........................ 27 Figure 2 Radio On-Air Schedule April 17, 1922 ....................................................................................... 30 Figure 3 Class A, B, C Station Schedule ................................................................................................... 33 Figure 4 Chain Broadcasting Circuits end 1927 ......................................................................................... 42 Figure 5 NBC Radio Broadcast Network Early 1934 ................................................................................ 44 Figure 6 Don Lee Network Spring 1934 ..................................................................................................... 45 Figure 7 CBS Network Early 1934 ............................................................................................................. 47 Mathews iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank Dr. Jill Watts for encouraging me to take this path. I had been thinking about completing a master’s degree in history for several years, but after my first appointment with Dr. Watts, I knew this was the right program for me. I would like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Charles for his encouragement, comments, and insights that helped me get this far. I am grateful for the constructive comments that Dr. Lewandowski gave about my thesis and project. I also had a great cohort of fellow students that made this journey fun. There were a few times when I had to diverge from my path to take care of my family. I would like to thank Dr. Darel Engen and Dr. Katherine Hijar for their understanding and compassion. I would like to thank Dr. Charles and Dr. Watts for their support and understanding when I had to slow down because of my school’s sudden switch to online instruction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My colleagues at JCS Pine Hills Academy supported me during this effort too. I could not ask for better people to work with. I would like to thank my husband Robert Forgey and daughter Rosalind Forgey for their love and support. They have had to listen to me talk about radio and newspapers for three years now. They were always good sports when I dragged them to different archives in Los Angeles and San Diego. My husband, an amateur radio enthusiast, provided technical explanations about the different radio equipment when needed. My father, Charles Mathews, passed along any information he found about radio. I love you all very much. Finally, I would like to dedicate this thesis to my mother Loretta Mathews who died of cancer during my second semester in this program. She believed in the power of education. Mathews v Abstract In this thesis, I argue that the newspapers that owned and/or operated radio stations in Los Angeles and San Diego sought to create new print and broadcast multimedia corporations but ultimately failed because they faced several obstacles that they could not overcome. Newspapers wanted to use radio to promote their stations and to attract advertising revenue. However, as radio grew into an entertainment business rather than an information business, the newspaper-owned or controlled stations found that they needed to create live entertainment programming in addition to the news. The cost of broadcasting equipment and programming ultimately led the Los Angeles and San Diego newspapers to sell or discontinue their stations. By the time that network broadcasting reached the west coast in 1930, none of the newspapers in Los Angeles or San Diego county-owned radio stations. This thesis covers the period of early broadcast radio that occurred from 1920 through 1930. Keywords: early radio, newspapers, Los Angeles, San Diego, 1920s, broadcasting, west coast Mathews 1 Introduction In the announcement of their new radiotelephone broadcasting station in April of 1922, the Los Angeles Times promised to dedicate “its sending station to the welfare and the entertainment of the people.” Many newspapers, including those in Los Angeles and San Diego, wanted to participate in the radio craze that had swept the nation after the first broadcasts from the Detroit News station WWJ in 1920. In the April 22, 1922 edition of Editor and Publisher, Thomas Ormsbee identified several ways that newspapers applied “radio telephony to newspaper publishing.” Newspapers created radio sections that served the purpose of educating the public about radio, extolling the virtues of the new medium, and listing the broadcast schedules of stations. Newspapers that wanted to broadcast their content either built their broadcast station or partnered themselves with local stations. The newspaper-associated broadcast stations understood they had to appeal to local and in some cases national audiences; this led to careful consideration about what to broadcast and a conscious effort to play up the altruistic nature of the programming in their newspapers.1 News broadcasting got its start on Pittsburgh station KDKA, which started broadcasting in early 1920 as amateur station 8XK. Frank Conrad, who had worked for Westinghouse during World War 1, had access to the vacuum tubes needed for continuous speech broadcasting. 1 Thomas H. Ormsbee, “Newspapers Capitalize Radio Craze in Manifest Ways,” Editor and Publisher 54, no. 47 (April 22, 1922): 16; John S. Daggett, “‘Times’ Radio Station Dedicated Tomorrow,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 12, 1922; Randall Patnode, “Heralding Radio: The Social Construction of Broadcasting by Newspaper Specialty Sections, 1922–1926,” (PhD dissertation, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999), 3 – 11; Michael Stamm, Sound Business: Newspapers, Radio, and the Politics of New Media (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 30 – 31. Mathews 2 Conrad started to transmit records and live performances for other amateur radio operators. When a local department store mentioned Conrad’s station in an ad for radio receivers in the local newspaper, the powers at Westinghouse realized that radio could be sold to the general public as well. Historian Susan Douglas has argued that national considerations motivated Westinghouse to support the KDKA broadcast of the election results in 1920. While the KDKA broadcast was only heard locally, amateur radio operators spread the news of the broadcast throughout the nation, and information about the broadcast was soon picked up by the media. The broadcast of the 1920 presidential election results over stations WWJ and KDKA were the radio equivalent of the “shot heard around the world”. Interest in commercial broadcasting increased dramatically over the next two years. The total number of commercial