SAN JOSE — Soon after Charles Herrold created history’s first radio broadcast from a studio at First and San Fernando Streets here in 1909 — using a 15-watt spark transmitter that projected his voice 20 miles — he began reading stories clipped from the newspaper to a small but loyal group of listeners.

In one form or another, news radio thrived in San Jose for more than a century.

Until Monday.

That’s when KLIV — among the last independent, all-news radio stations in Northern California — abruptly announced it would change its format to country music in the coming weeks. Under the steady hand of the station’s 94-year-old majority owner, Robert Kieve, the focus remained stubbornly local: If you were tuned to 1590 on the AM dial, you heard traffic and weather reports about San Jose and Silicon Valley — not San Francisco or the East Bay.

But when Kieve considered the forecast for low-budget news radio in the birthplace of broadcasting, he could see only dark clouds and a sea of red ink.

“It’s very painful,” he said, shortly after announcing the change in one of his broadcast commentaries, segments usually reserved for Kieve’s pet peeves, such as dry cleaners who overdo the starch in his shirts. “There is no local news station here anymore, which is happening in market after market in the United States. It just costs too damn much. It’s so much easier to put on some music, automate it, and save all kinds of money on salaries.”

In his commentary, Kieve blamed the cost of news gathering and declining ad revenues for the shift. “Indeed, in the 30 years that KLIV has been a local news station, it has never made a profit,” he said, “it has lost money every year. 2015 was the worst year in our history.”

With only five news staffers, KLIV has far fewer guns than a robust news-gathering operation such as KCBS-AM, which finished No. 5 in the most recent San Jose Nielsen rankings — it was No. 1 in the larger Bay Area market. KLIV ranked 20th in San Jose. “I don’t see news as a declining format,” said Joel Abrams, who taught radio classes in San Jose State University’s Radio, Television and Film department. “But the people who want to do news are going to have to do very well if the audience is going to support it.”

KLIV was trying to appeal to a Silicon Valley audience that skews younger, but the ratings repeatedly showed its listeners mostly had a hand cupped behind their ears, straining to hear. “Our ratings were pretty fair in the older demographic,” Kieve said. “But most advertisers really don’t care about old people, and as a result we haven’t been getting much advertising.”

Some time in the next few weeks, the station will switch to “country classic” music from the 1980s and ’90s, in tandem with its sister station, “hot country” KRTY-FM, which had been carrying KLIV financially for years. “That’s probably a good tactical move for them because they’ll have younger listeners on FM, and slightly older listeners on AM,” Abrams said. “As a sales tool, that would be a good pairing.”

Kieve said that all but one member of the station’s news staff would depart, though some news programming — a talk show hosted by Carl Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and Phil Cosentino’s produce reports — will continue. As he did several years ago when he sold FM station KARA, Kieve said everyone who leaves will receive a year’s salary.

“It’s very painful,” Kieve said of the format change. “We really feel that a radio station should be serving the public. This is the station I’ve been working on, and enjoying, and feeling it was doing a lot of good. We want to continue doing good wherever we can.”

The development of broadcast radio — employing Herrold’s news-reading format — never produced a profit for KLIV, but it may have spurred the local economy in another important way. “The reason Silicon Valley developed in San Jose,” said former San Jose State journalism professor Gordon Greb, also 94, “was because you had brainy people experimenting with new technology. Starting with radio.”

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at Twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit.