KPCC (FM)

KPCC (FM 89.3) – branded LAist 89.3 – is a non-commercial educational radio station licensed in Pasadena, California. KPCC itself is primarily serving Greater Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley; through rebroadcasting and translator stations, KPCC's programming also reaches the Santa Barbara, Coachella Valley, Palm Springs, and Ventura County, California areas, and part of the Inland Empire area. The station is owned by Pasadena City College and operated by the American Public Media Group's Southern California Public Radio (SCPR), in addition to serving as an affiliate for National Public Radio and Public Radio Exchange. It originates some of its own shows. The studios are located in Pasadena, and the station transmitter is on Mount Wilson.

As of 2023^[update], SCPR served "more than 527,000 listeners each week". It is one of two full NPR members in the Los Angeles area; Santa Monica-based KCRW is the other.^{[citation needed]}

Pasadena City College has a history in radio back to when it was still Pasadena Junior College, a combined high school and college; in 1934 it began hosting a montly radio show on the Pasadena Presbyterian Church station KPPC (AM). Pasadena City College's 75th anniversary history book mentions "an experimental program every Monday night in 1942 on KPCS" named "Presenting Pasadena for Pasadena Preferred", produced by the PCC Radio Division and the Chronicle.

Pasadena City College opened a radio studio on December 14, 1947, with a studio classroom, engineering room, work room, and reception room, but no transmitter or broadcast license; the studio instead continued to broadcast its programs over other local radio stations, such as KPPC and KXLA (AM). The college was also active in television from September 1949, using the Pasadena Playhouse, which had its own television department.

The college began its own broadcasts on FM in April 1957 as KPCS, with a transmitter purchased from KWKW. It used the former KWKW-FM 250-watt transmitter and studio equipment, and a small antenna on the roof of the campus administration building that provided limited coverage. The station was operated by, and for, students who were studying broadcasting at the college.^{[citation needed]} One of the few two-year college stations with an FCC broadcast license, it originally on the air from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., it went to "all day" broadcasting on October 1, 1962. The original callsign of KPCS stood for "Pasadena City Schools", but in the meantime the institution operating KPCS had been renamed to Pasedena City College had afterward split into a separate community college district;^{[citation needed]} so the callsign was changed to KPCC at the end of 1971.

During the 1970s and 1980s the station won numerous broadcasting awards. The radio station and television studio were flooded in the 12-day rainstorm that affected Pasadena in 1983.

Formerly, the station broadcast from a transmitter in Orange County, later from Downtown Los Angeles (at the Frank Stanton Studios), and on the PCC campus. The station originally broadcast from the campus of Pasadena City College in Pasadena.^{[citation needed]}

KPCC's transmitter and radio tower moved from the C Building at PCC to a higher-powered facility on Mount Wilson in 1988. In 1993, the studios also moved out of the C Building, where they had been confined to a cramped basement, and into the newly built Shatford Library with the television production studios and Media Center, where the radio studios remained until 2010.