[Kzyxtalk] Memo of the Air - Good Night Radio will be on KMEC as well as KNYO.

[Marco McClean]

I'm about to send this to the AVA. Look it over for me, would you?

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Dear Editor:

     Here's my email address:  memo at mcn.org
     And here's my weblog:  http://memooftheair.wordpress.com
     Be sure to read the About page.

     Here are a couple of free offers to the general public:  1. Email 
me me and I'll put you on my list for a weekly notification that the 
recording of each new Memo of the Air show is up for listening and 
downloading.  2. If you write something you want me to read on the air 
--poetry, public service publicity, art, science, fiction, kvetching, 
whatever-- email it to me and I'll read it on the air. It's just like 
all the papers I published and my old show on KMFB; I promise to air 
everyone who wants to be aired and even a few who don't want to be. 
That's the way all media, not just radio, should work: Let people in and 
lift people up. I appreciate that it's the way the Anderson Valley 
Advertiser does it, and that's why I often read from the AVA on my show.

     For the past two years I've been doing my show, /Memo of the Air - 
Good Night Radio/ on KNYO-LP in Fort Bragg (107.7fm) every Friday night 
from 9pm until I get tired or run out of material --usually that's some 
time around 3 or 4am. KNYO is a low power station that reaches Fort 
Bragg and Caspar.

     Soon I'll be on KMEC-LP in Ukiah, too. Ed Nieves is working out the 
details of whether they'll pick me up live in progress at midnight and 
drop off when I drop off or they'll play a recording of my entire KNYO 
show the next night starting at midnight. Probably KMEC will set their 
automation to step on my show for a moment at the top of every hour and 
run their recorded ID-- that's what I want; it's the easiest way.

     Just look at KMEC's schedule and website: http://kmecradio.org/
     They are clearly doing it right, and like KNYO they're doing it on 
a budget a microscopic fraction of KZYX's. Here, see how right they're 
doing it: I'll be on the air at KMEC within a few short weeks of when I 
first approached them with the idea. (I was on the air at KNYO starting 
in 2012 within a week of contacting Bob Young, as I was on KMFB starting 
in 1997 within a week of contacting Bob Woelfel.) I'm so looking forward 
to getting back the writers in the Ukiah area who used to send me 
material because of KMFB. I'm thrilled that this is happening.

     Which reminds me --and you can skip the rest of this if you want to 
stop at the end of the happy part; I wouldn't blame you-- I and a number 
of others still want our shows on KZYX. After many years of applying and 
contacting and visiting and waiting and getting some really unpleasant 
treatment it seems unlikely that will ever happen, regarding my show, 
anyway, and it's a shame. Maybe one day the management will turn over or 
have an epiphany or something and things will change, but I have trouble 
imagining it, not because my imagination is faulty but because 
everything about the management of KZYX --an organization that has 
sucked down literally millions of taxpayers' dollars in its twenty-five 
years of existence-- is and has always been oppressively opaque. I mean, 
it could be they're desperately hanging on by their fingernails just to 
keep their petty power and ridiculously inflated salaries, or it could 
be they're being directed by fermented forces of wine money or 
oleaginous forces of Koch money, or it might be they have a nest of 
alien snakes in their heads, the way most commercial radio stations' 
owners do, which is pretty much the same thing.

     It's most likely that they just don't know any better and they 
don't want to learn. They can't grasp that smart, experienced, valuable 
people might dislike being treated like bugs, and they think that we 
can't possibly be all that smart if we don't know to keep our mouths 
shut about injustice the way the sort of people they allow to keep their 
shows do, you know, if we really want their permission to be on the 
public air. And maybe they really don't see the injustice they're doing. 
They don't think they're doing anything wrong because the result is they 
have what they want, and for them that's the definition of right, and 
the few people who prosper under and around them naturally agree.

     If that's the case, boardmembers of KZYX, then the solution is to 
ask your manager and program director if they're in it for the money or 
for the love of radio. And when they say it's for the love of radio, cut 
their salaries to the rate the programmers are paid, which is zero, and 
then you'll see how much love for radio they really have. That also 
solves having to do weeks of egregiously unlistenable pledge drives just 
to pay management to organize weeks of egregiously unlistenable pledge 
drives, universally reviled as the worst radio ever. Come on, be honest: 
pledge chuckleheads start their pitch, you change the channel or turn 
the radio off and do anything else; it's that bad, and that unnecessary, 
and that easily done away with. Put the managers on the same financial 
footing as the people actually doing the work. Because you can and you 
should. (And monkeys will fly out of my butt.)

--Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://memooftheair.wordpress.com

[end]

(Please print the email address and the URL.)