KKLY (89.5 FM) is a

radio station Radio broadcasting is transmission of audio (sound), sometimes with related metadata, by radio waves to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. In terrestrial radio broadcasting the radio waves are broadcast by a land-based radio ...

El Paso, Texas El Paso (; "the pass") is a city in and the county seat, seat of El Paso County, Texas, El Paso County in the western corner of the U.S. state of Texas. The 2020 population of the city from the United States Census Bureau, U.S. Census Bureau w ...

, United States. It is owned and operated by the

Educational Media Foundation Educational Media Foundation (formerly EMF Broadcasting, abbreviated EMF) is an American nonprofit Christian media ministry based in Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. EMF is the parent company of K-LOVE and Air1—the world's largest ...

as a transmitter in its K-Love network, airing

contemporary Christian music Contemporary Christian music, also known as CCM, Christian pop, and occasionally inspirational music is a genre of modern popular music, and an aspect of Christian media, which is lyrically focused on matters related to the Christian faith and s ...

. Prior to being sold to EMF, the station was KXCR, a public, bilingual jazz music radio station, between 1985 and 2002.

History

On October 19, 1983, the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...

granted a construction permit to ETCOM (Empowerment Through Communication) for a new, 126-watt noncommercial radio station on 89.5 MHz in El Paso. ETCOM had been seeking a bilingual radio station for El Paso since 1976, when it was founded by the Metropolitan Board of Missions, and had already produced public radio programming for

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

, including feature capsules and a radio drama on the life of

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Sor may refer to: * Fernando Sor (1778–1839), Spanish guitarist and composer * Sor, Ariège, a French commune * SOR Libchavy, a Czech bus manufacturer * Sor, Azerbaijan, a village * Sor, Senegal, an offshore island * Sor River, a river in the Or ...

. The new station went on the air in May 1985 as KXCR, a station with an emphasis on local and community programs, mostly in English but with some output in Spanish. The young station was chosen to house the Latin American News Service, a

Corporation for Public Broadcasting The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is an American publicly funded non-profit corporation, created in 1967 to promote and help support public broadcasting. The corporation's mission is to ensure universal access to non-commercial, ...

-supported news agency providing bilingual reporting on Latin America to as many as 77 public radio stations. The news service closed in 1989 due to a failure to secure funding sources beyond the CPB. By 1989, KXCR's primary musical format was jazz. The station was struggling for funding in a rare market with two separate public radio operations and had nearly gone off the air in 1988. The jazz and world music programming was supplemented by additional spoken-word fare, such as the public radio program ''

The World In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

'', in 1996. It added alternative music at night in 1998, seeking to reach a youth audience. Beginning in April 1995, one particularly unusual feature produced at KXCR—distributed to 185 stations in the United States and beyond—was ''Universo'', the Spanish-language version of ''

StarDate ''StarDate'' is a science radio program of The University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory, broadcast on over 360 radio stations. It is a daily guide to the night sky and breaking astronomical news. Typically heard without formal introdu ...

''. (KXCR itself did not air the program, which station executives believed to be the only syndicated radio program originating from El Paso.) In April 2002, KXCR ceased to air most of its programming, with the temporary exception of its youth shows, and was leased out to the Educational Media Foundation, which immediately began airing K-Love. EMF closed on the $1 million purchase of the station in January 2003. The studios were purchased by the Self Reliance Border Media Project after the EMF takeover.

References

External links

{{K-LOVE K-Love radio stations KLY Radio stations established in 1985 1985 establishments in Texas Educational Media Foundation radio stations KLY