KNEW (960 AM) is an American biz news radio station licensed to Oakland, California, and serving the San Francisco Bay Area. It is owned by iHeartMedia and most of the programming comes from Bloomberg Radio. KNEW also carries Oakland Athletics baseball games. The radio studios are located in the SoMa district of San Francisco. KNEW transmits 5,000 watts using a three-tower array directional antenna at all times. The transmitter is located in Oakland at the eastern end of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. KNEW can also be heard on the HD Radio digital subchannel of 103.7 KOSF-HD2. History KFWM and KROW On July 8, 1925, the station signed on as KFWM. It was owned originally by the Oakland Educational Society. The Oakland Post-Enquirer wanted a radio station to compete with the Oakland Tribunes KLX. This station became KROW in June 1930, and used those call letters until 1959. It was a full-service station known for launching the career of comedian Phyllis Diller and for helping the career of "the world's greatest disc jockey" Don Sherwood, prior to his long career at KSFO. In 1947, the station built a new transmitter on a 20-acre island leased from the Port of Oakland. The new transmitter was accompanied by an increase in power from 1,000 watts to 5,000 watts full-time. KABL This station is best known as the longtime home of KABL, the successor to KROW and one of the first beautiful music stations in the United States. It was owned by 1950s radio pioneer Gordon McLendon. According to longtime McLendon national program director, Don Keyes, in his book Gordon McLendon and Me, McLendon wanted to own a station in the San Francisco market, and 960 KROW seemed ideal because of its relatively low dial position and strong coverage of the San Francisco market. Beautiful Music McLendon had success with Top 40 stations and the original plan had been to launch a similar, youthful format on KROW. But after McLendon and his team visited the market and discovered there were already several Top 40 stations, they decided there wasn't room for another one. As a result, they looked to KIXL, a beautiful-music station in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, market that was enjoying a fair amount of success despite being daytime-only. They decided to launch a similar format on KROW using KIXL's formula of quarter-hour blocks of familiar musical selections (three instrumentals, arranged by