[Kzyxtalk] Through consistently bad management KZYX hemorrhages half a million dollars every year. And all the while that same bad management lies to you that they need more and more money to stay on the air at all. Happy Pledge Drive.

[Marco McClean]

[Editor: Please include my email address and weblog URL at the end if 
you can.]

Through consistently bad management KZYX hemorrhages half a million 
dollars every year. And all the while that same bad management lies to 
you that they need more and more money to stay on the air at all. Happy 
Pledge Drive.
--by Marco McClean

The board of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting --more simply said: 
KZYX-- pays Mary Aigner and David Steffen some amount that they won't 
disclose even to the paying members. It's probably $40,000 per year 
each. And their "operations" person is probably paid $40,000 a year, and 
John Coate is paid $60,000 per year, during which he fakes up a couple 
of financial reports and apparently once per decade calls the neighbors 
to have them cut down a tree that's grown in the way. Just those four 
people's pay totals to $180,000 every year-- the equivalent of three 
thousand six hundred (!) yearly fifty-dollar memberships, which is way 
more active members than KZYX has or had or will ever have. So none of 
the membership money nor donated money supports the station in any way; 
it can't buy replacement equipment, nor solve engineering problems, nor 
establish a downtown studio in the county seat, nor pay the airpeople, 
but it all goes to enrich a handful of entrenched bureaucrats who are 
not making the station better by their presence but are simply 
entrenched there. Every time John Coate tells the board that he can't 
improve the scratchy signal or the STL path nor do crucial maintenance 
or set up that important studio in Ukiah --much less move the main 
studio to Ukiah-- nor [fill in blank] until a miracle occurs to produce 
more money-- I wonder: what prevents the board from seeing that they 
have that money already and that they've always had it? It's just 
constantly vanishing to pay John Coate to lie to them that they don't 
have enough money. And they are paying him with the money he's lying to 
them that they don't have, and the most positive thing you can say about 
what he does for the radio station is: he sucks money out of the system 
so it won't feel all bloated.

I just read John Coate's latest state of the station report, where he 
crows proudly about the KZYX news department and how it's come "roaring 
back", as though he's responsible for something monumental and laudable. 
Look: there was a news department at KZYX up to 2008, when John's first 
act in office was to destroy it and fire everyone so there would be 
money for him to be paid to do things like dispense with the news 
department. Because, eh, who needs hard-hitting local news? Ya gotcher 
classical show and your jazz show and your hippie wind-music shows and 
Prairie Home Companion and that should be enough for ya. Oh, wait, 
that's right, he also dumped A Prairie Home Companion, the most popular 
show they ever had. Finally, in 2015 --that's seven years later, but 
who's counting?-- after a threat over the technical illegality of his 
--I'm going to say this again-- eliminating the entire news department 
in favor of paying himself, he assembles a thin short shadow of that 
news department, and contact information for the individual newspeople 
isn't even made available on the website (just as the boardmembers can't 
be contacted except by going through Stuart Campbell) ("We like it that 
way," Stuart wrote to me), and that's just one example of how much KZYX 
has improved under J.C.'s occupation. The news department hasn't "roared 
back" but rather mewed piteously after having crawled part-way back up 
the side of the hole he and his weirdly compliant board kicked it into. 
Watch them kick it back down when it gets up on its hind legs again.

John Coate is a fraud. KZYX isn't improving; it's merely continuing to 
exist in a fugue state. And here is how little it has really cost for 
KZYX all along to keep microphones plugged in, and do a touch-up here 
and there on the official paperwork, and pay for a couple of IDSN-linked 
studios, and internet service and web hosting and telephone lines and 
STLs, and pay to energize the really very small main transmitter and the 
two teensy translator stations (translators use about as much 
electricity as a single back-porch light bulb), and tower space rental, 
and music publishers' fees and so on, and even computerized bookkeeping 
--the whole operation and overhead; everything, all of it really costs 
less than $50 a day, meaning way less than $20,000 a year, which is a 
very small fraction of just the annual grant from Uncle Sugar. Add 
$30,000 to pay for NPR shows, if they must, and the total comes to less 
than $50,000 a year. Which is /half a million dollars per year less/ 
than they're constantly flushing away under John Coate's "financial 
genius" guidance. Also I've met him. In person, as the face of the 
station, he is a testy, insecure/angry man who literally ground his 
teeth when he spoke to me. And it's not just when he speaks to me or 
speaks in private; if you've ever been to an MCPB board meeting or 
watched one on television you've seen this. It's who he is all the time.

Even so, if he had wanted to be published in my paper or to be on my 
television show or to have his own radio show on any of the radio 
stations I've ever had anything to do with, he could walk in and do it. 
I'd have no objection; I'd encourage it. It would mean the man was 
growing and, you know, making an effort. But he doesn't want to do 
anything like that-- he has no use for radio; he's afraid of it and he 
obviously hates radiopeople and hates the public. What was the reasoning 
behind putting him in his position of control over a radio station and 
everyone in it? And why does the MCPB board continue to unconditionally 
support him? It's baffling. It's crazy. Is it just because he looks like 
the dad in a family of J.C. Penney plaid-pyjama mannequins, except also 
scowling and seething? Because that's funny but it's not a good enough 
reason.

And they certainly don't need David Steffen. Take a look at their own 
various financial reports of the past few years, as incomplete and 
internally conflicting and confusing as everyone knows they are 
deliberately made to be. David Steffen's efforts --whatever he and they 
imagine he's doing-- barely return the station enough to pay him. Other 
stations get along fine without a David Steffen. And Mary Aigner-- other 
stations that have programs equal to and better than shows on KZYX (I'm 
speaking here in terms of my show and KNYO, just for instance) get along 
fine without a tyrannical program director or any program director at 
all. And back to John Coate-- what radio-station-improving and signal 
clarifying ability does the board see in him that might develop in some 
nebulous future? The only skill he has exhibited so far is to influence 
them somehow to keep shoveling cash at him and wherever he points while 
the physical plant continues to deteriorate.

If the airpeople are expected to volunteer their time and energy and 
talent, why is it beneath John Coate and Mary Aigner and David Steffen 
to similarly volunteer? If it's ridiculous to consider even mildly 
throttling back on the money diversion that John's and Mary's and 
David's salaries represent --which amounts to endlessly hemorrhaging 
many times the actual cost of running the station (see above)-- how can 
the board continue to declare it ridiculous to pay the actual airpeople 
a meaningful stipend for the airpeople's essential work? If the board's 
reasoning is that John and Mary and David do better work for being paid, 
why should that not apply to the airpeople? They call the airpeople 
their "wonderful volunteers" --well, get John and Mary and David to 
wonderfully volunteer and they can be wonderful volunteers too, and the 
station will have hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to spend and 
never have to do another smarmy pledge drive ever again. Think of it: 
they could dispense with all their soul-shriveling lying about how much 
the station needs pledges and donations "to keep the great shows on the 
air." The board could just live and enjoy it and be people and do their 
own unique shows, if they're the sort of people who want to do radio and 
lift people up to do radio, and if they're not, why are they on the 
board of a radio station?

The purpose of a community radio station is to provide a place for 
people to do shows that just can't be done on commercial radio. That's 
what the whole lower end of the FM band was set aside for in the first 
place. It's dead easy to pay to keep a radio station on the air and do 
better, more interesting radio than commercial stations do. My show 
belongs on KZYX. From my point of view, when my show wasn't on the 
schedule there within six months of my offering it (in February of 
2012), that was a measure of Mary Aigner's malice and incompetence, and 
by extension the malice and incompetence of the organization. I waited 
years before I started bitching about it, and before I started looking 
into how poorly the station is managed in general, and telling you 
people what I found out. By all means, pledge money during this latest 
in the endless series of unlistenable KZYX pledge drives if you can't 
help yourself, but keep in mind that when they tell you they need your 
money, that's a pants-on-fire lie. You've already paid and you continue 
to pay with your taxes whether you like it or not, and there's plenty of 
money to "keep the great shows on the air". The shows are not in any 
peril that the managers don't create themselves. When you give money to 
the current regime at KZYX, what you're really paying for is to keep me 
and people like me off the air there, and to keep people in power who 
don't deserve it, who aren't in it for radio and never were, but just 
for the money and the power trip. KZYX is like one of those cancer 
charities where the people managing the charity company keep all the net 
for themselves. Or even more like Scientology, because it's not even a 
charity, and it relies on very simple 100-year-old technology. In the 
case of Scientology, it's tin cans and a galvanometer and official 
secrecy and compressed gaseous horsepucky. So you see it's very similar.

I recommend that if you have some radio money burning a hole in your 
pocket you give it instead to 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg, where every 
underwriting penny goes to improve the station. KNYO is not funded by a 
government grant, and though it isn't luxurious and its broadcast reach 
isn't far there are facets of its operation that are ingenious and 
fascinating, such as a new system that lets airpeople do their scheduled 
shows by live remote from anywhere there's reliable internet access, and 
there are retro facets --we have a brilliant old piano now, right there 
in the station's downtown storefront performance space-- and KNYO does 
it all on 1/50th of KZYX's absurdly inflated budget. Contact Bob Young: 
bobb at poetworld.net to support KNYO or even to get airtime for your own 
radio show. There are good slots open in the schedule. It's easy and 
fun, and you can do it.

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


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