On-air changes follow shift of control at KKJZ, Long Beach

Jazz announcers Chuck Cecil and Helen Borgers stayed on the air at KKJZ in Long Beach, Calif., when Mt. Wilson Broadcasters took over operation of the station April 21, the Orange County Register reported. But others, including Joni Caryl and Scott Willis, lost their gigs. On the same day, listeners of KUOR-FM in Redlands, east of Los Angeles, lost jazz programming entirely when its licensee, the University of Redlands, took the occasion to drop its KKJZ simulcast and picked up Southern California Public Radio’s all-news service, repeated from KPCC in Pasadena, the Redlands Daily Facts said. SCPR plans to launch a news bureau at the Redlands site. Cal State Long Beach, the licensee of the Long Beach station, sought proposals for operation of KKJZ last year and gave the job to Mt. Wilson in October.

Something about it broke me

Like many newspaper commentators, Arizona Republic's Robert Robb found inspiration for a column in what he heard on NPR, or saw on its website, in this case: The painful-to-read profiles of the Virginia Tech victims. He wrote: "So many lives of promise. I was holding it together until I came to Henry Lee, a computer engineering freshman at Virginia Tech. Lee moved to the United States from China as a child and entered elementary school here not speaking English. He nevertheless became his high school salutatorian. He was, however, reluctant to speak at his graduation ceremony, but was talked into it. There was something about Lee's story that broke me. Or perhaps it was the concatenation of his and all the other stories..."