Culture · Salt Lake City
KUER-FM: A Salt Lake City Public Radio Institution
Salt Lake City’s KUER-FM began as an educational classical-music station and developed into a regional public radio service carrying NPR, other public radio programming and local Utah news.
By KLGBT News Desk ·
KUER-FM is a public radio station based in Salt Lake City and owned by the University of Utah. Its studios are in the Eccles Broadcast Center on the university campus, while its main transmitter is on Farnsworth Peak. A network of additional transmitters rebroadcasts the station across Utah, extending its reach well beyond the capital city.
The station began broadcasting on June 5, 1960, as an educational outlet centered on classical music. In 1962, it took on a regional role after its transmitter moved to Mount Vision in the Oquirrh Mountains. That change helped establish KUER as a service intended for listeners across a broader part of the state rather than only those near its original signal.
KUER’s development was not uninterrupted. The station faced two financial crises that nearly forced it off the air. During the 1970s and 1980s, it changed substantially as public radio expanded and NPR was created. Its format became a hybrid: classical music during the day and jazz at night. The station’s programming in both areas included personalities who remained with KUER for many years, giving those portions of the schedule a durable identity.
The station also changed locations. In 1993, KUER left cramped quarters in historic Kingsbury Hall and moved into the newly built Eccles Broadcast Center. That facility became the station’s home on the University of Utah campus and remains central to its Salt Lake City identity.
The 1990s brought a new competitive environment. KUER’s classical-music programming faced pressure as listeners moved to KBYU-FM, while the arrival of KCPW added another new competitor. Those developments placed the station’s programming choices in a changing local radio market and contributed to the broader evolution of KUER’s offerings.
Today, according to the supplied station history, KUER-FM combines programming from NPR and other public radio distributors with local news coverage for Utah. For Salt Lake City residents, that makes the station part of the city’s civic and cultural infrastructure: it is locally based, university-owned and connected to listeners throughout the state. Its history also reflects the shifting role of public radio, from an educational classical-music service to a broader operation balancing national distribution partnerships, local reporting and a statewide broadcast network.
Source and reuse information This automatically generated backgrounder adapts text from “KUER-FM” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KUER-FM The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. The source article’s linked references are provided below where available. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.
Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://web.archive.org/web/20090425050640/http://www.kuer.org/insidefm90/home.php - https://www.kuer.org/radio-signal-faq#stream/0 - https://viaf.org/viaf/314902791 - https://enterpriseefiling.fcc.gov/dataentry/public/tv/publicFacilityDetails.html?facilityId=124934 - https://enterpriseefiling.fcc.gov/dataentry/public/tv/publicFacilityDetails.html?facilityId=170892 - https://enterpriseefiling.fcc.gov/dataentry/public/tv/publicFacilityDetails.html?facilityId=170181 Image rights Photograph description: <a href=" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_Peak " rel="noreferrer nofollow">Farnsworth Peak</a>, home to most of the Salt Lake City area's FM and TV station transmitters. Plus a number of FM ham radio repeaters. The two transmitter sites, left to right (or south to north) are "Little Farnsworth" and "Big Farnsworth." They are named after Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television. The pe Creator: Doc Searls. License: CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A2016_02_16_lga-ord-slc_172za_(47715793521).jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.