Another commercial classical FM flips to noncom.

The classical format on commercial radio moved from "endangered species"
closer to "extinct" over the past year, when prominent standard-bearers WQXR
New York and WCRB Boston were sold to public broadcasters who converted them
to noncommercial operation. Another leading commercial classical voice, the
Lutheran Church-owned KFUO-FM in St. Louis, is embroiled in legal and
political battles stemming from church leaders' attempts to sell the big
class C0 signal to a religious broadcaster. Now Seattle's KING-FM (98.1) is
laying the groundwork to end more than half a century of commercial
classical radio in the Puget Sound area. "With all the changes in media in
the United States, commercial advertising is no longer a fit for KING," said
Christopher Bayley, president of the board of the community nonprofit group
that's operated the station since its founders, the Bullitt family, donated
it as part of the dissolution of their King Broadcasting group in 1995.

+ What's next for KING-FM.

Bayley says there's a lot of work to be done before KING-FM makes the switch
to listener-supported status. The "Beethoven" group, which has been
operating the station for the benefit of the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera
and ArtsFund, has to create a new non-profit corporation to own the station,
win FCC approval for the flip to noncommercial status, join the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, ramp up a fundraising campaign to begin collecting
listener dollars, and wind down the commercial ad sales, which have been
conducted on KING-FM's behalf by Fisher Communications. If all goes
according to plan, KING-FM will play its last commercial on June 30, 2011.
Barring more format changes or sales between now and then, that will leave
only a handful of commercial classical FM stations remaining around the
country.

+ Who's left?

Once KING-FM takes its big voice noncommercial (it's a 66-kw/2320' full
class C from the West Tiger Mountan master-antenna site), it will leave just
four big-market commercial classical stations in the US. Two have
noncommercial owners: city-owned WRR, Dallas (101.1) and Chicago's WFMT
(98.7), which operates commercially but is owned by Chicago public
broadcaster WTTW-TV. Then there's Robert Conrad's venerable WCLV, Cleveland,
which downgraded to a rimshot facility almost a decade ago. That leaves
Entercom's KDFC-FM, San Francisco (102.1) as the last of a dying breed of
full-market, fully-commercial classical FMs. Entercom also runs classical
programming on an AM in Kansas City (KXTR 1660), where it's also heard on
the HD2 subchannel of one of Entercom's FMs. You don't need much more than
two hands' worth of fingers to count the rest: Mapleton's KBOQ (103.9) in
Monterey, CA; foundation-owned KDB, Santa Barbara (93.7); American General
Media's KHFM, Santa Fe, NM (95.5); Judson Group's WCRI, Block Island, RI
(95.9); Ken Squier's WCVT, Stowe, VT (101.7); Sandab's WFCC (107.5) on Cape
Cod; Davis Media's WBQK (107.9) in the Norfolk, VA market; and three Nassau
"W-Bach" outlets on the Maine coast. By contrast, when the first edition of
the "M Street Radio Directory" (ancestor to The Radio Book) came out in
1989, it listed 32 commercial classical FMs and more than half a dozen
commercial classical AMs.