Couple donates $1 million to KCLU Radio

Endowment to support award-winning news division

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Dennis and Linda Fenton have contributed to KCLU since it debuted in 1994.

Photo: Brian Stethem

(THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. – April 28, 2016) A Westlake Village couple has donated $1 million to support and expand the award-winning news department of KCLU Radio.

The Linda and Dennis Fenton KCLU Radio News Endowment will be used to hire personnel and enhance equipment, programming and production. The National Public Radio station serves Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

The Fentons have contributed to KCLU since it debuted in 1994, with Linda becoming a member during its inaugural fundraising drive. She joined the KCLU Advisory Board in March.

The New York natives moved to California in 1982 to become two of the early employees of Amgen when it was a biotechnology startup. Linda retired in 1987 to focus on raising their son, Douglass. Dennis retired in 2008 as executive vice president of operations. He currently serves on several corporate boards and is vice chair of the board of the Keck Graduate Institute. Literacy and science education have been focuses of the couple’s philanthropy.

KCLU has received more than 200 awards for its local news coverage and consistently wins more awards than any other Southern California station with a small staff. News Director Lance Orozco, the station’s only full-time reporter, has won two national awards – a 2012 Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and a 2010 National Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association.

A community service of California Lutheran University, the station began broadcasting to Ventura County from a tiny studio in a residence hall on the Thousand Oaks campus. The signal was expanded to include Santa Barbara and part of Montecito four years later. The purchase of a station in 2008 increased KCLU’s signal strength in the Santa Barbara area and expanded its reach to Goleta, Isla Vista and Ventura County’s Rincon. A new KCLU Broadcast Center, with the station’s first dedicated newsroom, opened in 2011. Two years later, KCLU purchased a Santa Maria station to expand its range to northern Santa Barbara County and southern San Luis Obispo County. KCLU now has more than 100,000 weekly listeners. 

KCLU members provide the financial resources for news coverage of the tri-county region. About 65 percent of the budget comes from listener pledges, and another 15 percent comes from business sponsors.

The station provides NPR and local news programming in Ventura County at 88.3 FM, in southern Santa Barbara County at 102.3 FM and 1340 AM, on the Central Coast at 89.7 FM, in San Luis Obispo at 92.1 FM, and online at kclu.org

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