[Kzyxtalk] A valuable suggestion.

[Marco McClean]

To the MCPB (KZYX) board of directors:

I see that you're now advertising for people to apply to be program 
director of KZYX.

Listen, you've just hired a station manager who's perfectly capable of 
performing her job. The tasks of a program director are a very small 
part of simply managing the station. Also positions of business 
underwriting coordinator and office manager are made superfluous by a 
real manager. And certainly a separate operations manager is not needed; 
the station's manager can manage the station's operation.

The equipment of a radio station is generally reliable. And where it's 
not, that's an indication of money needing to be put there and not into 
sinecures for the station's window-dressing henchpersons.

I've spent a great deal of my adult life in radio stations, and I can 
tell you that, when the station's operation is not crapped up by petty 
politics and related new-age-nepotism and secret back-room deals and the 
counterproductive OCD routines of self-important poobahs, a competent 
station manager can easily, you know, competently manage the station.

You're paying the manager the equivalent of 1,200 yearly $50 memberships 
to show up and sit there all day and answer the phone and email and 
update the website and touch the bookkeeping program once in awhile and 
automate what's sensibly automated, and to solve little problems and 
phone the engineer or IT tech or bookkeeper to deal with bigger problems 
that pop up.

What makes you think the new manager can't do what you're paying her to do?

There, I just saved you more than a million dollars over the next ten 
years. You can use half of that to pay all the local airpeople to do 
what the station is there for in the first place, and you'll still be 
far enough ahead to dispense entirely with the egregiously unlistenable 
pledge drives. Merry Christmas.

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