[Kzyxtalk] Fair compensation at KZYX.

[Marco McClean]

On 6/17/2015 10:14 PM, Daney Dawson wrote:
> Obviously....the point I am trying to make is not that the station's purpose is to enrich any individuals, but to fairly compensate the people responsible for the operation of the station...

     Daney, those operating the station are the people preparing for and 
doing their shows; many of them are college educated and/or trained 
musicians like you, who bring their own specialized equipment and years 
of expertise to the work. You're right to imply that a lot of airpeople 
at KZYX, like everywhere else, are dilettantes playing CDs and 
identifying the station at the top of the hour and maybe chuckling with 
their two regular callers, but even those people are the reason the 
station gets tax money and attracts memberships. Much more so than 
employing managers. A manager and a program director and an ad 
(underwriting) salesman together sucking $140,000 a year out of the 
station --the equivalent of 2,800 yearly fifty-dollar memberships --more 
members than KZYX ever had or will have-- is beyond comically wrong. 
It's outrageously wrong. And I'll tell you why:

     The people most responsible for the operation of the station's 
physical plant are the ones who manufactured and installed the 
transmitters and translator stations and antennas and plugged and 
screwed the equipment together, and they mostly live a long way away, 
and they did their work and were paid a long time ago. That's done.

     You seem to have the impression that the so-called general manager 
must be a henpecked wretch doing a thankless job, frantically crunching 
numbers, trotting around making sure everyone's doing the right thing at 
the right time, digging holes to plant trees to shade the station and 
pedaling a generator the rest of the time to keep everything working. In 
fact a radio station is a small number of very reliable boxes that 
require no attention or care at all and only a few dollars a day, in 
total, for electricity. If the manager were to fall down a well and go 
missing for weeks, no-one would notice. When something breaks, sure, the 
manager, or whoever breaks it, has to shove it back together, if he 
knows how, or call an engineer to fix it, but calling takes a few 
minutes and involves lifting the telephone and talking into it. And 
failure hardly ever happens. That's what /reliable/ means. When it gets 
unreliable it gets replaced by an engineer. Because he was called on the 
phone. And the engineer is paid by the hour. If a problem persists, it's 
because the manager keeps calling the wrong engineer.

     And if once every four to seven years the roof leaks, the manager 
is responsible to call a roofer to patch it. Not difficult. Not time 
consuming.

     In real life, people with radio shows arrive on time ready to do 
their shows, and if they get a flat tire or sleep late, or if their 
remote studio has a problem connecting and they miss the first five 
minutes, automation takes over and IDs the station and plays music 
appropriate to that show so it's seamless. I suppose it might be 
uncomfortable for the manager to have to eventually telephone someone 
bizarre enough to refuse again and again to appear as scheduled but it 
/hardly ever happens that a person with a regular radio show misses his 
airdate; airpeople just do not do that. In my entire life I have never 
missed a single airdate./

     And all the shows you hear from NPR and other syndication systems 
(themselves tax funded) play themselves. It's no more complicated than 
the computer in your own house, that you use to type your opinions to us 
on. An IT person --or, after a few minutes' training, anyone else 
available-- schedules those recurring things once and they're set. When 
it's time for Morning Edition, Morning Edition starts. When it's time 
for Amy Goodman, Amy Goodman starts, and so on. The manager's attention 
is not required for syndicated shows. Nobody at the station has to 
anxiously sit there in the garage and watch the computer blink. Nobody 
has to watch the clock and flip a switch. As regards the manager having 
to deal with airpeople, when I do my KNYO show by remote I email Bob 
Young to let him know, and when I do it from the studio on Franklin I 
let myself in (if there's no-one there before me with the door open), do 
my show, clean up after myself, lock up and leave. And it's the same for 
the others there. And it was like that at KMFB, except Bob Woelfel was 
always there, and that was good, too.

     Right, I almost forgot: the techies who maintain the internet 
provider so those syndicated shows can squirt through the right tubes. 
They're essential. And they're miles away and paid by their own company.

     There's a bookkeeper with bookkeeping software to take care of the 
bookkeeping at KZYX. And except when it's time to fake up a financial 
spreadsheet for the board the manager doesn't even have to say hi and 
bye to the bookkeeper. A system like PayTrust (from the same company 
that makes TurboTax) automatically pays all the bills, only needing to 
be tended for ten minutes a month. By the bookkeeper.

     The board of directors declared itself responsible for raising 
money, and they accomplished most of that a quarter of a century ago 
when they got KZYX on the CPB gravy train.

     Maintaining the show schedule on the website might take a couple of 
minutes when a show is given up or a new show premiers or shows shift 
around to better times.

     But the main thing the manager is needed for is to maintain the 
FCC-required paperwork, including putting any letters written to the 
station, presumably after reading them, into the public inspection file 
in the file cabinet all the way across the room. That and all the other 
crucial tasks for a radio station manager add up to an afternoon of work 
per month, which he should be paid for by the hour.

     I repeat: the most important people at the station are the ones 
preparing for and doing their shows, for which they should be paid more 
than the booby-prize /gas money/ so many people have been only 
half-heartedly proposing lately, and they shouldn't have to be afraid to 
lose their show and be kicked out and blackballed and ostracized forever 
after if they cross some petty power-mad poobah in management. They 
should be able to do their show the best they know how without 
interference, because it's their show, not the manager's show, not the 
so-called program director's show. It's certainly not the business 
underwriting coordinator's show.

     When I recommended Bob Woelfel for the job of general manager at 
KZYX --now that John Coate has fled, thank Christ (after they gave him 
nearly half a million dollars! and all he accomplished in eight years! 
was firing the news department right off the bat and 7.6 years later 
starting a pretend new one and adding one bell and two whistles to the 
web page)-- I meant that Bob Woelfel will do the job of general manager, 
including half a dozen other jobs at the station, and do it all way 
better and more cheerily than the current whole lot of them, for not 
making a huge weepy deal about how /hard/ it is and how it's /so much 
work/ to deal honorably with a few people who are justifiably angry for 
being maliciously shut out of a public resource that should be ours by 
right even if we're the sort of people who refuse to kiss the big 
massa's figurative spotty behind, and instead take a picture of it and 
hold it up to ridicule.


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

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