Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

They say all, even bad, publicity is good publicity. But sometimes it can be disheartening and feel cruel and uncalled for. It can also make you put on your big-girl/boy-panties and forge ahead.

In its early years KUVO had a love/hate relationship with the Denver Post TV & Radio reporter – shall he remain nameless? Or is it history? Or is it a matter of “Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh!

In January 1984, Granfalloon transferred control of 89.3 FM to KUVO, and Clark Seacrest, then a columnist for the Denver Post somehow noticed. The first article in which he mentioned KUVO summarized the sad history of previous groups unsuccessfully attempting to establish a radio station at 89.3 fm and noted that the “new aspirants” needed to raise almost a half million dollars to succeed. He pointed out that the project was being led by “a former legal assistant with the Colorado attorney general’s office….who freely admits that she has ‘absolutely no background in broadcasting’….” Clark seemed to imply that the “new aspirants” were also not going to succeed.

The next month in his February 1984 column titled “Fundraising Base Too Narrow” Clark noted “a group of well-meaning Denverites has undertaken a fundraising campaign…to muster $150,000….A preponderance of the group’s efforts thus far is heavily couched in the Hispanic community. Names associated with the fundraising efforts are heavily Hispanic, and the group’s functions …have been strongly geared toward the Hispanic culture.”

He went on the say “All of which is fine and dandy but can a fundraising effort so ethnically oriented produce the necessary bucks?” And the conclusion of his article was that he and others agreed “…if you depend primarily on the Hispanics, it’s just not going to happen.”

Even after KUVO went on the air – as Mr. Seacrest would say, despite the fact that it was staffed, governed and supported by the Latino community – Clark didn’t send his congratulations.

Instead on September 30, 1985, a month after KUVO began broadcasting Clark Seacrest declared that “KUVO Launched Without A Rudder.” Critical of the format, Clark wrote “…KUVO’s program log shows that the day’s programming ,,,is overwhelmingly music. Indeed, music could be bilingual KUVO’s undoing.”

He analyzed the folly of KUVO’s format. “The station features an exceptionally diverse mixture of jazz, Latin, East Indian, South Chicago blues, gringo ballads, occasionally a modern rock number and frequently a raucous brand of music you hear emanating from ghetto blasters at bus stops. If anything, KUVO might be too diverse for its own good.”

But in spite of the doomsday predictions of the Denver Post, in 2025 KUVO celebrates forty years of having diversity in music serve as its rudder.