Michael Horn, the Los Angeles broadcaster who founded CRN Digital Talk Radio and helped push talk radio beyond the AM dial decades before streaming became standard, died earlier this month, according to his daughter, longtime Southern California talk radio host Jennifer Horn.
Horn built CRN Digital Talk Radio in 1983 and served as its CEO, at a time when most of the industry still thought of radio as a single frequency reaching a car speaker. He pushed the company onto cable television, then into streaming, and eventually onto digital apps, arguing that talk programming belonged wherever an audience could be found rather than confined to a transmitter.
In a personal essay published by the New York Post, Jennifer Horn described her father as a man whose drive could not be separated from who he was. “If one idea didn’t work, he looked for another way,” she wrote. “If someone told him something couldn’t be done, that only made him more determined to prove otherwise.”
She said his reach went well beyond the company itself, crediting him with opening doors and creating opportunities for people who had been pushed out of a notoriously difficult industry.
“Sometimes my dad put friendships ahead of economic success. He valued the relationship over the transaction, the person over the immediate payoff.”
Jennifer Horn, herself a veteran talk radio host in Southern California, wrote that while her father’s business instincts were sharp, the part of his life she valued most wasn’t measured in ratings or revenue.
“His greatest legacy isn’t a radio network or a new way of broadcasting,” she wrote. “It is the people who love you. It is the lives you change. It is the memories that will stay with us long after the world has moved on.”
