[Kzyxtalk] KZYX Winter Pledge Drive

[sako4 at comcast.net]

PUT ON A HAPPY FACE 

To the Editor: 

So from what I can gather, the KZYX Winter Pledge Drive was a flop. I'll explain. 

The drive ended on Sunday night. The fundraising goal was $70,000. Sensing that Macro McClean's excellent op-ed in local newspapers -- an op-ed titled "Not a Dime" (see link below) -- as to why the public should withhold their pledge support, the $70K number had already been knocked down by KZYX's power elite to $70,000 from $90,000. 

Historically $90K is KZYX's usual pledge drive goal. 

Toward the end of the pledge drive, Sunday morning, only $37,000 had been raised. So by either standard -- $90K or $70K -- the pledge drive was turning out to be a huge flop. 

But then a curious thing happened. According to KZYX's Facebook page, a whopping $13,000 was raised on Sunday. 

Management says this $13K is a "one-day record". But something smells fishy . I suspect what really happened is that a few Board members all chipped in on Sunday to bail out the station and to save face from what would have been a really disastrous pledge drive. I really don't think a flood of new people came forward at the last minute to become new members at $50 a pop. 

Back when I was a programmer and did pledge drives, I saw this a lot -- management would jack the numbers with all sorts of tricks. The most common trick was the "anonymous matching pledge" or something like that. It was all a fiction. 

So why did the pledge drive flop? 

Mr. McClean op-ed piece, "Not a Dime", published in the AVA remains the best argument as to why the public needs boycotted KZYX at this time. KZYX needs a new business model. No highly-paid salaried staff. No staff except for one person. A really talented chief engineer. And we need to also make capital investments in new broadcast equipment and technology. And we need to move KZYX's main studio from Philo to Ukiah. If there's any dough left over, give it to the station's 100 programmers in the form of gas money -- they're the real talent at KZYX, not highly paid, do-nothing managers who resist job descriptions, work logs, and job performance evaluations. 

Folks needed to withhold financial support during this pledge drive to save the station, not destroy it. Current management needs to go. They're the problem . John Coate, a pompous guy who is KZYX's Executive Director , General Manager, and Master Martinet -- yes, his business card lists all three titles -- has ten years in. 

Business Manager, David Steffen, and Operations Manager, Rich Culbertson, have more than ten years in. 

Mary Aigner, a really viperous gal who is KZYX's Program Director and The Real Power Behind the Throne -- again, from her business card -- has 25 years in. 

All of the above expect lifetime job security. 

The only way Coate, Steffen, Culbertson, and Aigner will go is to starve the station's finances. The Board of Directors won't fire them, despite the fact that the station's broadcast signal is often down -- it was down even during the last pledge drive. Karma's a bitch! 

The Board won't do diddly. Why? Because the Board is complacent. It's a rubber stamp Board . It's handpicked by management. Coate and Aigner have always meddled in Board elections. 

I had a bumper sticker printed up that I've distributed to over a hundred people all over Mendocino County. It reads: "KZYX -- Starve the Beast!" 

Starve the Beast! People understand. They didn't need to think about it. No explanation was necessary . No pledges at this time, thank you very much. The people of Mendocino County want their public radio station back. It doesn't belong to Coate and Aigner. They want it back. 

And that's why KZYX's Winter Pledge Drive was a flop. 

John Sakowicz 
Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Board (2013-2016), Board Treasurer (2014) 

link to Marco Mclean's op-ed, "Not a Dime": http://theava.com/archives/40629 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.mcn.org/pipermail/kzyxtalk/attachments/20150224/16251ffb/attachment.html