By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, October 2012
In mid-October 2012, Nic Harcourt — the former KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic host who had handed the show to Jason Bentley in December 2008 — returned to LA morning radio. His new home was CSUN’s 88.5 FM (KCSN), the relaunched Cal State Northridge public-radio station, where he would host a 6-to-11 a.m. weekday show beginning October 19. The LA Times’s Randy Lewis broke the story; the original FishbowlLA framing tracked the long arc of Harcourt’s post-KCRW Valley-side migration.
Then
Harcourt’s exit from KCRW in late 2008 had been one of the most substantial public-radio music-host transitions in LA-media history. Morning Becomes Eclectic under his leadership had been one of the country’s most influential music-discovery programs across the late 1990s and 2000s. Jason Bentley taking over had been a generational shift in the show’s direction.
The post-2008 Harcourt arc had included segments at Sirius XM, an FBLA-covered fall 2011 KCSN program-relaunch, and a 2012 Saturday-only show called Connections Made by Guitar Center. The October 2012 move — to weekday mornings, five days a week, on the rebuilt KCSN — was the completion of what the original FishbowlLA framing called the “Valley-side Harcourt progression.”
Harcourt’s pitch in the Randy Lewis LA Times interview was structurally accurate: LA was still a “golden radio town” because of how much people drove. The terrestrial-radio audience the city sustained was substantially larger than what other major U.S. metros were sustaining, in large part because of the LA commute. The 88.5 FM signal, broadcasting from the CSUN campus in Northridge, was well positioned to reach the broader Valley commuter audience.
The original FishbowlLA framing was admiring — both of Harcourt’s continued willingness to do morning radio and of the broader narrative of LA’s terrestrial-radio durability in the early streaming era.
Now
KCSN 88.5 FM continued to build out its music-discovery programming through the post-2012 years. The station eventually rebranded as 88.5 FM “The SoCal Sound” through a partnership with the LA Magazine and other media operations; it has continued operating across multiple subsequent programming cycles. The Harcourt morning show was an anchor of the station’s early-2010s relaunch, though Harcourt’s day-to-day involvement scaled back in the years that followed.
Nic Harcourt has continued in music-related work across the interval — soundtrack consulting, occasional radio segments, music-supervision projects. The broader category of full-time terrestrial-radio music-discovery DJs has substantially thinned across the decade and a half since 2012; what was an unusual move in 2012 (a heavy-hitter DJ doing five-day-a-week mornings on a smaller-signal LA station) would be effectively unimaginable now.
Jason Bentley left KCRW in 2019 after an 11-year run hosting Morning Becomes Eclectic. The show has continued under subsequent hosts. KCRW’s broader curatorial-music identity has held up better than the U.S. public-radio-music-discovery category as a whole.
LA’s “golden radio town” thesis — which Harcourt advanced in the 2012 LA Times interview — has held up reasonably well. The LA-region terrestrial-radio audience is still larger than what comparable U.S. metros sustain, though streaming platforms have substantially absorbed the broader music-discovery function across the same window. The 2012 KCSN launch reads now as one of the small documented moments when LA-region public-radio was still confidently building out new terrestrial-music-radio infrastructure on the eve of the streaming-era displacement.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.